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.
Organised by Chiara de Cesari (UvA), Michiel van Groesen (UL), Lidewijde de Jong (RUG), Susanne Knittel (UU).