At Home Otherwise: Rethinking Heritage through Diversity
We invite Master students CADS to help us investigate possibilities for diversifying and democratizing heritage through practices of “home-making”. Their research may include studies of everyday heritage of minoritized groups, displays of immigration histories, forms of collaborative heritage, and research into how visitors experience today’s museums - mostly in the Netherlands, with possible comparisons elsewhere in Europe. We are open to audio-visual productions, also when supervised by CADS’ Visual Ethnography team.
Everyday Heritagization
While research into minoritized groups’ material culture and home-making increased in the 21st century, and policies towards social inclusion proliferated, it still seems difficult to include the former into official heritage practices. Explicit and implicit binary oppositions between those ‘at home’ in the nation, and the guardians of national heritage on the one hand, and those regarded as ‘other’ of foreign still structure a large number of the practices of museums and heritage organizations. In our project, we research heritage as ‘home-making’: a non-binary practice of combining memories of roots and routes, dwelling in the present, and desires for the future. This perspective makes everyday heritagization more complex than is commonly assumed by officially authorized heritage discourses. We focus on semi-public (allotment) gardening by minoritized groups, museums aiming to displaying minoritized heritage (in the eyes of both makers and visitors), and the experiences of a new generation of ‘multicultural’ curators inside and outside authorized national institutions. We welcome any project that helps us understand confrontations and collaborations between minoritized groups’ everyday heritage activities and authoritative heritage institutions.
Our research should support collaborative research, both with partner institutions and citizens. We work closely with Imagine IC, Reinwardt Academy for Cultural Heritage and other organizations. Our social partners not only help to set our agenda but also to find out which forms of collaboration may lead to more democratic heritage relationships in the future.
This research project centers collaboration, both with partner institutions and citizens. We will work closely with Imagine IC, Reinwardt Academy for Cultural Heritage and others. Our social partners not only set our agenda but also help us find out which forms of collaboration may lead to more democratic heritage relationships in the future.
Research proposal
Please approach us if you are interested in the project and want to discuss it with an eye to developing a project proposal (Peter Pels: pels@fsw.leidenuniv.nl; Willem van Wijk w.l.van.wijk@fsw.leidenuniv.nl). We can show you how your proposal can demonstrate its added value to our project, and Peter can act as MSc supervisor in 2024-2025. We can award small subsidies to your project proposal, but we can only make decisions about such awards after the deadline for handing in MSc research proposals in mid-December 2024. Depending, of course, on your choice of research group, active and/or passive command of the Dutch language will give you an extra advantage. However, we will, of course, also consider relevant research in other languages and other parts of the world.