Building Future Heritage

Name: Building Future Heritage
Start: 2025-09-26T10:00:00.000+02:00
End: 2025-09-26T19:00:00.000+02:00
Location: VOX-POP

Heritage is deeply entangled with violence, conflict, and the destructive transformations that are affecting our present such as the climate emergency. Yet, while heritage can be destroyed, transformed, re-interpreted or manipulated, it also serves as a powerful tool for cultural resistance and creativity, survival memory and societal healing.

The ways we protect, interpret and produce heritage – across local, national and transnational contexts – can shape both historical justice and future peace by (re-)creating common grounds and solidarities. In the context of multiple, overlapping crises, the questions of heritage, conservation, and cultural memory take on a renewed urgency and require us to rethink our theoretical frameworks, concepts, and approaches.

Four Dutch universities together – the University of Amsterdam, University of Groningen, Leiden University, and Utrecht University – organise this one-day seminar on these themes. Starting from the recognition that heritage is never neutral but rather entangled with dynamics of power and identity-making, our focus is on the profound entanglement of the material and immaterial dimensions of heritage as well as that between past, present and future in processes of heritage-making. The seminar intends to serve as an incubator for inter-university co-operation and engagement on this important theme for societies in the past, present, and future.