This book explores the concepts and practices of participation and community engagement in cultural heritage, examining the impact of the participatory turn in the heritage sector and the key opportunities and challenges it presents.
Participation has become a widely used umbrella term in the discourses of heritage institutions, practitioners, and scholars alike. This participatory turn represents a shift toward the active involvement of communities, stakeholders, and the public in decision-making processes, moving away from traditional top-down approaches toward more inclusive and collaborative models in which diverse voices contribute to cultural heritage. While the pluralisation of heritage narratives, meanings, and practices can sometimes give rise to societal tensions, this book argues that broader participation is essential for unlocking heritage’s transformative potential and future-oriented impetus. The book explores these issues through 15 case studies drawn from across the globe and organised into three thematic sections: social inclusion in heritage practices, the role of digital tools in heritage participation, and participatory heritage management and governance. These case studies contribute to emerging debates on expanding the spaces where heritage participation and community engagement take place.
Interdisciplinary in nature, this book is intended for scholars and professionals working on cultural heritage, participation, social inclusion, digitisation, management, and community and audience engagement. It is also well-suited for undergraduate and graduate courses that critically examine heritage participation and community engagement in today’s pluralistic societies.
This book explores the concepts and practices of participation and community engagement in cultural heritage, examining the impact of the participatory turn in the heritage sector and the key opportunities and challenges it presents.
Section I: Heritage participation and social inclusion;
1. Looking
beyond recited truths of heritage participation Inclusive perspectives on
institutions, epistemologies, and representation;
2. Examining public
perceptions of Roma representation in cultural festivals in Sibiu.
3. Local
cultural festivals as spaces of inclusion The festival organisers
perspective.
4. Branding Germanness in Transylvania. Combined and uneven
heritagisation;
5. Sauna Dialogues The methodological potential of sauna as
a site for making heritage futures;
6. History and heritage in Sagunt, Spain:
An opportunity for social innovation through university culture; Section II:
Digital tools in heritage participation;
7. Digitizing literary heritage:
Some lessons from the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel;
8. Technological
and cultural challenges in the collaborative design of participatory heritage
platforms between the Global North and Global South: Toward decolonial
computing.9. Playing with history: Engagement and mediations through
Assassins Creed An ethnographic perspective;
10. Digital media and
safeguarding intangible cultural heritage of minority groups in China: A case
study of animated short films Orochen Tale of Nisan Shaman and Orochen
Creation Story; Section III: Managing heritage participation;
11.
Opportunities and challenges of participatory heritage governance: Developing
the Seminaarinmäki Campus as a European Heritage Label site in Finland;
12.
Engaging communities of practice in cultural heritage. A multi-site study of
private partners within French cultural ecosystems;
13. Reframing knowledge
in cultural heritage: Promoting openness and public engagement in museums
through organic management;
14. Civic engagement in cultural heritage. The
Transylvanian Saxon case over the last century;
15. Revisiting the darkness:
Participatory approaches for engaging with difficult and dark heritage
places;
Tuuli Lähdesmäki is a professor of art history at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specialises in critical heritage studies, heritage policies and politics, cultural memory, identities, and narratives of Europe.
Johanna Turunen is a post-doctoral researcher of contemporary culture studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her work is focused on the intersections of critical heritage studies and post- and decolonial theory.
Andrei Terian is a professor of Romanian literature at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. He researches intangible cultural heritage, specialising in the textual heritage, cultural memory, canonisation, and digitisation.
Renaud Garcia-Bardidia is a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Lorraine and an associate researcher at the University of Burgundy, France. His research addresses the digitalisation of cultural consumption practices and the evolution of cultural institutions in this context.
