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Key research themes
1. How do nation-state bureaucracies and governance systems shape archaeological heritage practices and their political entanglements?
This research theme investigates the complex interactions between bureaucratic procedures of nation-states and archaeological practice, focusing on how governmentality transcends nationalist narratives. It highlights the subtle modes through which archaeologists and heritage practitioners become complicit actors within state agendas, impacting heritage management and knowledge production. Understanding these entanglements is crucial for revealing the nuanced political dimensions embedded in heritage governance beyond overt nationalism.
Key finding: This paper presents ethnographic evidence from Russia (Siberia) and Flanders showing that archaeological practice is deeply entangled with state bureaucratic systems, which extend beyond nationalist frameworks to include... Read more
Key finding: Drawing on ethnographic research on UNESCO World Heritage and the EU's heritage funding mechanisms, the authors illustrate methodological and ethical challenges in 'studying up'—investigating heritage governance at... Read more
Key finding: This volume, based on interdisciplinary case studies, explicates how international heritage regimes (e.g., UNESCO Conventions) are translated and implemented at the national level. It uncovers how local bureaucratic... Read more
Key finding: This chapter theorizes heritage as a regime—both an apparatus of governmentality and as international regulatory frameworks—and foregrounds the alliance between nation-states and UNESCO heritage programs. It advances the... Read more
2. How does neoliberalism reshape heritage regimes, cultural rights, and governance in global and local contexts?
This theme addresses the profound transformations in heritage governance under neoliberal political-economic paradigms. It explores how market logic, governmentality, and rights discourses reconfigure state roles, empower new actors, and commodify culture as a resource. Research under this theme critically engages with shifting multiscalar heritage governance assemblages, emphasizing culturalized politics and expanded cultural rights claims that simultaneously challenge and reproduce neoliberal rationalities in heritage policy and practice.
Key finding: The authors argue that heritage studies must integrate nuanced anthropological and theoretical concepts of neoliberalism, governmentality, and human rights to grasp contemporary heritage governance transformations. They... Read more
Key finding: Reiterating and extending prior analysis, this work highlights governance reconfigurations where state power is externalized through market mechanisms and empowered citizenry, with cultural heritage becoming a resource for... Read more
3. How is heritage mobilized and contested within European Union initiatives and identity politics between EU and nation-states?
This theme investigates the discursive and institutional practices through which the European Union attempts to construct and legitimize a common European heritage and identity. It interrogates the tensions between EU heritage initiatives and entrenched national heritage regimes, showing how national actors negotiate, appropriate, or resist EU narratives, thereby illuminating the complex power dynamics, identity constructions, and subsidiarity principles influencing heritage designation in the EU context.
Key finding: Through an empirical case study of the Maastricht Treaty within the Dutch heritage sector, this paper reveals that national heritage actors sustain established national identity framings, limiting the capacity of the EU's... Read more
Key finding: This paper conceptualizes heritage diplomacy beyond state-centric cultural diplomacy as an analytical framework emphasizing the multi-actor, multi-scalar dynamics of heritage production and circulation. Applying this to the... Read more
Key finding: The paper develops the concept of heritage diplomacy, emphasizing heritage governance as a site of both cooperation and contestation involving multiple actors including intergovernmental and non-governmental bodies. Situating... Read more