‘Harnessing Heritage’: Resources from the EARC Conference 2024
This year our conference looked at how we can ‘harness heritage’ for social and economic good. It covered issues as broad as heritage and wellbeing, coastal heritage, heritage crime, heritage and AI, and how academics and heritage organisations can work successfully with businesses.
To catch up with the presentations and discussions on the day, click on the sessions below, or browse the photos and recordings via the links on the right.
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Dr Allan Brodie (Bournemouth University), co-founder of the Seaside Heritage Network
Think World Heritage; think pyramids, cathedrals and palaces. But England’s leading role in the Industrial Revolution has also been recognised by UNESCO and some of the world’s vital heritage of leisure has begun to be celebrated in the form of inscriptions for Bath and European spa towns, as well as for Nice as a winter resort.I believe that it is time to recognise the role of the seaside holiday in the world’s shared culture and to celebrate England’s leading role in its creation during the 18th and 19th centuries. This country boasts dozens of resorts that illustrate our love affair with the seaside as well as headline sites as different as Brighton Pavilion, Blackpool Tower and Eastbourne Pier.
However, while the English seaside might meet some of UNESCO’s criteria, this recognition would come with responsibilities. So, would it be worth it?
Slides from the talk are available here.
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Dr Ed Roberts (University of Kent), Rob Sharp and Vittorio Ricchetti (Southend Museums), Prof Thomas Smith, and Prof Malcolm McLaughlin (University of East Anglia)
This panel discussion will focus on approaches to heritage and explore how the creation of new partnerships, reframing community perceptions of local heritage and unlocking the potential of buildings and collections can help to realise a range of opportunities. From the promotion of societal wellbeing and community integration, to destination branding and commercial growth, when effectively used, heritage can have a transformative impact on coastal destinations.
Featuring representatives from both academia and the museums sector and representing a geographic spread from across the Eastern Arc region, the panel will share insight based on projects undertaken in Great Yarmouth, the Port of Dover and Southend-on-Sea. Coastal communities often face higher levels of deprivation and can suffer from negative external perceptions that often portray these towns and cities as insular and culturally barren places. In reality, these destinations offer a multifaceted and diverse cultural heritage with deep connections to global history and are places rich in both tangible and intangible heritage.Through facilitated discussion, panellists will consider the role of community engagement and partnership development in maximising the benefits of cultural heritage. The session will consider the ways heritage can be utilised to empower communities, supporting health and wellbeing and increasing resilience. The panel will also consider the potential for heritage sites to be seen as assets that can support business development and growth models as opposed to the perception of these spaces as obstacles to be overcome.
Slides from the talk are available here.
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Prof Jim Ang and Prof Catherine Richardson (University of Kent), Ben Blyth (University of Calgary), Sarah Wolfterstan (UCL), and Dr Callan Davies (University of Southampton)
This session explores the convergence of immersive technologies (VR/XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics in revolutionising the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of cultural heritage. We will delve into cutting-edge research and applications that harness the power of human-machine collaboration to safeguard and enhance our understanding of tangible and intangible heritage, and explore its links with the health and wellbeing of the community. Having introduced a range of projects at various stages, we will turn to our audience to start a discussion about ways forward in this area, and are keen to discuss both the benefits and the problems associated with working with evidence and collections in this way.
Key Themes
- Immersive Storytelling: Investigate the use of VR/XR in creating engaging narratives that transport audiences to different eras and cultures, fostering a deeper connection with heritage.
- Heritage and Wellbeing: Examine the impact that engagement with cultural heritage can have on individual and community wellbeing, promoting a sense of identity, belonging, and social connection.
- Virtual Museums and Heritage Reconstruction: Explore the virtual reconstruction of lost or inaccessible cultural sites, offering unprecedented access and educational experiences.
- Robotics in Conservation: Explore the role of robotics in the delicate task of preserving and restoring fragile artefacts, ensuring their longevity for future generations.
- AI-Powered Heritage Analysis: Discuss how AI algorithms can be used to analyse cultural artefacts, decipher ancient languages, and create deeper understanding of historical texts.
Slides from the session are available here.
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Dan Chilcott (Create South East)
According to Historic England, England’s heritage sector’s directly contributed £15.4bn to the UK’s Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2021. However, many working in heritage organisations, or researchers working on heritage projects, are uncertain or unaware of how to approach businesses and develop mutually beneficial collaborations.
This session is intended to demystify the process, to offer some hints and tips on how to do so, and to encourage participants to reach out to industry. It will include case studies from those working in businesses with a heritage focus, and will be an informal and open opportunity to discuss the benefits and challenges facing those working in the sector.Presented by the Create South East team, the session will also look how businesses within the Creative Sector are harnessing opportunities for growth and investment.
Slides from the session will be uploaded shortly.
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Dr Arianna Mazzieri and Dr Alix Green (University of Essex), and Louise Willsher (Community360)
The session will offer a collaborative learning space to champion innovative ways to show the impact on social wellbeing produced by heritage projects, and to use them to influence public policy making. The ground for discussion is provided by the work of Community360 (C360), an Essex-based charity aiming to inspire and enable social action to improve people’s quality of life. Since 2017, C360 has worked in partnership with University of Essex to collect oral histories and record the lived experiences of volunteers and community organisers, including rapid response collecting during COVID-19. C360 is now working with local partners to co-produce a community archive of the voluntary and community sector, run by and for the people of Colchester. The archive aims at celebrating the richness of work done when communities come together, which is often unseen or lost, connecting people with their communities and, thereby, positively impacting on their wellbeing.
Through a blend of facilitated discussion and group work, the session will adopt a participatory approach to explore practices that maximise the visibility and impact of the voluntary sector on effecting social change and improve local lives. The speakers will prompt discussion and collaboration by posing thought-provoking questions and sharing audio-visual materials from C360’s oral archive.
In this session, the attendees will learn from a rich experience of knowledge sharing with a varied audience — including researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and business people — and pick up the best heritage-related practices to influence decision making in the public sector and improve communities’ wellbeing.
Slides from the session are available here.
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Dr Thomas Roebuck and Dr Sophie Butler (University of East Anglia), Darren Leader (independent), Rachel Ridealgh (Norfolk Library and Information Service)and Fiona Hall (National Trust)
The Eastern region is rich in a form of heritage asset that presents particular challenges and interpretative possibilities: collections of historic books from the first centuries of print. Less visible than built heritage, requiring highly specialised interpretative skills and knowledge, and presenting distinct obstacles to curation in traditional forms, historic book collections present obvious challenges. And yet the light they shed on the intellectual and cultural life of past centuries, their capacity to inspire creativity and to evoke powerful feelings of belonging today, makes them a rich and often untapped source of potential.
Over the last several years, UEA academics, Dr Sophie Butler and Dr Thomas Roebuck, have been working closely in partnership with colleagues in Norfolk Library and Information Service and National Trust in order to unleash this potential, working with diverse methodologies including collaborations with creative industries, volunteer training, and innovative forms of digitisation. This session will take stock of that work (which formed an Impact Case Study for REF2021), and explore three current new avenues of partnership work, all linked by a turn towards a focus upon historic book collections as productive loci of community empowerment, wellbeing, and pride-in-place.First, we will explore renewed work in partnership with National Trust’s Belton House (Grantham, Lincolnshire), home to one of the NT’s finest libraries, with a focus on engaging hard-to-reach local communities with the library. Secondly, we will focus upon the hugely exciting instance of King’s Lynn, where a new library is currently under construction to become part of a Multi-User Community Hub (MUCH), partly funded by the Town Deal. We will invite discussion and feedback on our strategic development of a community co-curated exhibition of the town’s historic books, looking at methodologies for governing such a project that ensure genuine inclusion.
Finally, we will share the latest developments in a long-standing collaboration with creative professional Darren Leader, whose own extraordinary journey from encountering the region’s historic book collections have led him to his current project on merchants’ marks, the potential for community and business engagement of which we will be exploring in a forthcoming programme of creative workshops, walking tours, and exhibition funded by the AHRC as part of the 2024 Being Human Festival of the Humanities.
Taken together, this session will form an ideal opportunity for academics, library, museum and heritage professionals, and creative artists, to explore the ways we might leverage the region’s book collections in the future to strengthen the wellbeing of our diverse communities.
Slides from the session will be uploaded shortly.
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Rosalind Hewett (Norfolk Museums Service), Colin Howey (MensCraft), Holly Sandiford (Norfolk Museums Service), Esther Watts (National Centre for Creative Health/NHS Sussex), Dr Jonathan Webster and Prof Sally Hardy (NICHE, University of East Anglia)
Engaging with heritage has been shown to play an important part in increasing wellbeing. It can lead to ‘increased confidence, social connectivity and life satisfaction,’ which in turn can result in strong ‘social relationships, sense of belonging, pride of place, ownership and collective empowerment’ (Pennington et al, 2019).This session brings together three organisations to explore how each of them uses heritage creatively to increase wellbeing.-
The Norfolk Initiative for Coastal and rural Health Equalities (NICHE), based at the University of East Anglia, is funded by NHS England (East of England) to co-create a healthy place to live and work, underpinned by collaborative and innovative approaches to building embedded research, practice improvements and innovation capacity.
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MensCraft is a Norfolk-based charity focusing on the health and wellbeing of men. It supports men facing life’s challenges or experiencing difficulties with their mental health, and offers innovative and creative activities and support to improve wellbeing.
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The Creative Health Associates Programme is run through seven integrated care boards (ICBs), including Sussex ICB, and aims to ensure that creative health is integral to health and care and demonstrate the power of culture and creativity to benefit the lives of individuals and communities.
Speakers from the three organisations will offer three very different perspectives on how to engage positively with heritage for wellbeing. However, through a series of demonstrations and case studies, participants will better understand the commonality and potential that such engagement offers. Audience members will be encouraged to respond to these ideas with examples from their own lives and, through this participatory and open engagement, come away from the session with new ideas, thoughts and questions for their own inclusive practices.Slides from the session are available as follows: -
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Lesley Hardy (Church of England)
Congregations and dioceses of the Church of England care for the largest single body of important early heritage in the country. Churches are centres of identity , memory wellbeing and spiritual significance for whole communities whether religious or not.
The future of these ancient sites is at risk. We face a crisis in the next five years because of rapidly collapsing numbers and resources. How can we address this urgent issue – the elephant in the room of heritage? How might we engage people in their sacred heritage and build lasting bridges that might conserve this important heritage and reconnect people to it.Slides from the session will be uploaded shortly.
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Dr Lorna Richardson (University of East Anglia) and Claire Boardman (University of York)
“2022 was yet another year of climate extremes across Europe and globally. These events highlight that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of our warming world.”
Samantha Burgess (European 3C Service Deputy Director)
As individuals and professionals, we must accept that we are no longer planning for climate change but consciously or unconsciously responding to it. Despite significant work having been and being done across the cultural heritage sector it still lacks focus and cohesion and therefore any sense of the effectiveness of this work.If cultural heritage IS to be the difference, then a critical assessment of current practice is required. Are we asking the right questions? Working with the right people? Using the right approaches? Do we have the data, tools, funding, roles and structures we need?
This interdisciplinary session aims to bring together a broad, representative group of academics and heritage practitioners and will follow the ‘Futurescaping’ speculative design protocol developed specifically for innovation and change the Cultural Heritage Sector by Areti Galani and Gabriella Arrigoni (Newcastle University) and their partners at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology.
Grounded in critical theory, speculative design, while future-oriented, is not about predicting the future. Leveraging collective intelligence its purpose is to suspend present-day constraints in order to ask questions about the politics and values in the sociotechnical systems that we currently experience (or might want to experience in the future) by creating an imagined world configured differently from our own. It is speculative in that it re-imagines the world to be organised into different social, political, economic, and technological configurations, or what Auger terms “alternative presents”.
However, speculation alone is insufficient. The final action in this workshop will evaluate what is needed, to deliver the desired future outcomes, against what is current to provide a starting point for a sectoral response to climate change.
Slides from the session will be uploaded shortly.
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Prof Margaretta Jolly and Dr Hope Wolf (University of Sussex), and Jeremy Noel-Tod (UEA)
In this session, we will be considering efforts to create regional archives of artistic and literary practice, or to contribute to regional archives.
Hope Wolf will discuss Sussex Modernism, a book and curatorial project which combines art and literature with regional cultural history, and which is set within the context of earlier initiatives, for instance at Towner, Eastbourne, to collect the artistic heritage of the region.Margaretta Jolly will discuss the Sussex Retold project, which builds a new archive of oral histories relating to Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft and interprets the records of local folksingers in the University Special Collections to reimagine the campus and its environs.Jeremy Noel-Tod will discuss the British Archive for Contemporary Writing, and how this archive, which is based at UEA, might preserve and feed creative engagement with regional identity.Karen Jacobs (TBC) will discuss the collection of local arts and folklore at UEA and will make links to her work with for the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. She will be discussing the ways in which persons and objects are interrelated.We will discuss the political implications of the spatial labels we place upon objects (local, regional, international) and we are interested too in the relationship between place and hierarchical distinctions made between ‘art’ and ‘artefact’.Slides from the session will be uploaded shortly. -
Mark Harrison (Historic England and Centre for Heritage, University of Kent)
The value of our built and cultural heritage cannot be judged in pounds and pence alone.The impact of theft from historic buildings and archaeological sites, including those situated in the maritime environment, has far-reaching consequences over and above the financial cost of what has been stolen. When thieves steal metal from a church roof or artefacts from a historic wreck or archaeological deposit, they are stealing from all of us and damaging something which is often irreplaceable.
Our understanding of the scale, extent and impact of the problem will continue to develop as the full range of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are implemented and will take account of the opportunities presented by artificial intelligence.
Significant progress has been made to enhance the response to the problem of heritage crime across the United Kingdom. There is more to be done and I will discuss the opportunities presented by working with local communities, academics, law enforcement and heritage professionals to develop the innovative tactics and technologies required to preserve our past for the enjoyment and benefit of future generations.
Slides from the session are available here.
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Rachel MacFarlane (National Lottery Heritage Fund), Emilia Sando (Arts and Humanities Research Council), John Simpson Wedge (Arts Council England)
The final session of the conference will be an opportunity for delegates to consider how to frame their projects so that they have the best possible chance of getting funding.
Speakers from three major UK funders with an interest in heritage will take part in a panel session to share their insights into what applicants should consider when preparing and submitting a proposal.
The session is structured into three parts. In the first, the speakers will outline their funders’ remits, eligibility and opportunities. They will then look at common pitfalls in applying for funding, and offer some hints and tips on putting together a successful application. Finally, they will give delegates an opportunity to explore how differing projects are assessed in competition against each other.
By the end of the session delegates should have a better understanding of what they need to consider when preparing a grant application, and the key elements that will help it be successful.
Slides from the session are available here.