FANZINE 05
Dear TRACErS,
As I already mentioned, this fanzine has been conceived as a "beacon". Not a dictionary, a glossary, nor a thesaurus (which are meant to provide "definitions"), this fanzine should rather be a tool that brings together selected key concepts emerging from and/or grounding TRACES, with the aim to outline a tentative and provisional statement of meaning for them, which shall be instrumental for the purposes of the project setting out the theoretical framework for our research activities.
The reasons beyond this idea are several, including considerations and comments from the scientific review and from the MtM, with feedbacks from our ethic board, other peers and scholars who attended these meetings, as well as a specific request from the EU Officer Zoltan Krasznai.
Since the 1990s onward, a growing corpus of studies has been delving into heritage and heritage practices from manifold and widened perspectives. They have been looking at heritage as multifarious and multilayered, mostly contingent, imbricated in society, open to several critical readings and quite often holding a somehow “contentious dimension”. Nor static neither a fixed entity already in existence, heritage thus has been investigated and theorised as a constitutive cultural process, shaped by contemporary social, cultural and political instances and inherently intertwined with memory, identity, owning and disowning, remembering and forgetting practices. On the wake of these studies, new promising lines of inquiry have been emerging and taking roots, expanding the field of study to include contributions from different disciplines and opening up to important theoretical and methodological opportunities to investigate different “types” of heritage for the potentially diverse meanings that may gather around them.
Nowadays however, heritage studies are expanding so fast that we might not be even able to keep on with the flow of literature generating as well a fast flowing river of terms that might end up in creating a confusion. Term coning is flourishing, with an increasing penchant to “name dropping”. This can be seen as a reaction to the struggle to define critical analytical categories for the study of a shifting field as heritage is. Terms define positions, but they can also become empty labels, and even reinforce disciplinary boundaries, rather than building bridges to enable dialogue, foster and nurture a interdisciplinary and productive approach to the complex issues at stance when reasoning about heritage in/and society. Indeed the risk to get trapped in terminology is actual and it becomes even more pressing in research projects, as TRACES, which start as multidisciplinary investigation but strive for a truly interdisciplinary dimension. It is not the case, I argue, that many of the most recent projects in the field faced somehow at a certain point the urgent need – yet the impossibility - to set out a shared language.
This is were this fanzine comes from.
I tried to draft an open list of key terms, recurring in our discussion (on basecamp, workshops, papers, conferences, etc) and shared bibliography including those terms emerged from the debate and dialogue with other ongoing EU funded fellow-projects.
Please feel free to implement the list, modify it, comment…
Among these terms I tried to highlight those which seems to be crucial for our project. I also included the name of those who might want to take care of the writing of the working statement of meaning (e.g. Roma and Erica already manifested an interest) but I hope that others will contribute.
I would need to get in touch with those who are keen to participate asap to agree together how to proceed ( my idea is: full paper for on line publication + short abstracts for the fanzine).
I am looking forward to hearing from you and working together on this.
Thank you all!
Francesca
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· Memory / collective memory, individual memory, cultural memory, social memory, multidirectional memory, agonistic memory, prosthetic memory, competing memories, ground memory.
· Post-memory
· Memory Complex
· Memoryscape
· Archive
· Heritage / Relational Heritage, Critical Heritage, Contentious Heritage (Sharon), Dissonant Heritage, Difficult Heritage, Displaced Heritage, Performative Heritage, Neglected Heritage (not sure this is crucial for us. Francesca)
· Difficult knowledge
· Heritagescapes
· Heritage sites
· Traumascape
· Lieux de Memoire
· Orphan sites (Roma)
· Europe
· European
· Europeanisation
· Reflexive Europeanisation (Regina)
· Locality
· Belonging
· Dissonance
· Displacement
· Racism
· Plurality
· Migration
· Crisis
· Instrumentalisation
· Authorative
· History
· Hidden Communities
· Heritage Communities (Erica)
· Heritage practices
· Curating
· Co-production (Suzana Milevska)
· Decolonise
· Post-colonial
· Colonial
· Multiperspective
· Multivocal
· Inclusive
· Contact Zone
· Performative (?? Marion)
· Appropriation
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