UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

All change please!

2021-06-09

Cornelius Holtorf presented a paper on “All change please: cultural heritage and sustainability,” for a virtual conference on International collaboration in a digital era – Fostering innovative minds for the future as part of the Swedish-Japanese co-project MIRAI 2.0 (9 June 2021). One of the aims of this initiative is to strengthen collaboration between Swedish and Japanese universities.

In his talk for ca 40 attendees, Holtorf emphasised the significance of culture and cultural heritage for sustainability and innovation.  The other contributions in the Sustainability section were from the natural sciences or dealt with policy and technology concerning the natural world. The other sections of the conference were about Ageing, Artificial Intelligence, Materials Science, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

It is time for the humanities (and the field of culture) to enter larger contexts of discussion about important issues!

Museum directors’ view on museum-entrepreneurship

2021-06-04

Anders Högberg published (with Marina Jogmark) a study in which they explore how Swedish museum directors think about museum-entrepreneurship.

 

You can find the article, in Swedish with an English abstract, in the journal Nordic Museology

https://journals.uio.no/museolog/article/view/8826/264]

 

Of special interest for the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures is the section on various forms of collaboration between researchers and museums. Among others, Högberg and Jogmark suggest that collaboration can develop by creating new forms for co-operation.

UN Initiative “We the Peoples”

2021-05-19

Cornelius Holtorf took part in the “We the Peoples” digital consultation of the United Nations. 

Building on the UN75 global conversation, the consultation invites stakeholders from different sectors to develop practical recommendations to: accelerate delivery of the commitments made in the UN75 Declaration, together with the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement; and to respond to new and emerging challenges.

He made two specific contributions:

Addressing Challenge 1: How can decision-making take more account of the future?, he suggested to “Enhance the capacity for futures thinking (futures literacy) among decision-makers.” 

Much decision-making about the present assumes unexamined that conditions will remain the same in the future. But based on all past human experience, this is not going to be the case. We can improve people’s ability to imagine alternative futures and design new strategies to act in the present in order to bring about novel futures.

Addressing Challenge 5: How can we build trust between people and institutions?, he suggested that “We need to learn more about people’s cultural meanings and values as they determine trust in society.”

Trust between people and institutions is an outcome of specific cultural meanings and values. It is easier to trust people and institutions that make sense in what they do and whose values you share.
Strangely, the realm of culture is vastly underappreciated in society, maybe because ethnology and social/cultural anthropology are very small subjects and not many decision-makers have much understanding of how human culture works.

Futures Literacy and Nuclear Waste

2021-05-10

Anders Högberg presented at the first capacity-building workshop of the Expert Group on Awareness Presentation, which is part of the Nuclear Energy Agency’s Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management at the OECD. Even Cornelius Holtorf participated.

The session, held on 10 May 2021, was dedicated to Futures Literacy and featured even a keynote lecture by Richard Sandford (UCL) who concluded with the following slide:

During the session, the 37 participants began to realise how they were using the future in various ways to inform specific actions and started to examine their own anticipatory assumptions regarding long-term communication of nuclear waste disposal sites. They also started to understand that the uncertainty of the future is not something that can or must be controlled but that it is instead important to learn how to embrace uncertainty in our present in order to reduce future uncertainty.

A next step is acquiring the capability of how to imagine alternative futures, and so the discussion will continue…

Swedish Museums’ Spring Meeting

2021-04-27

The theme of the 2021 Spring Meeting of the Organisation of Swedish Museums was “Contribute, Collaborate, Impact – together we come longer” (27-29 april 2021). 

The programme featured an interview with Anders Högberg and a conversation including Cornelius Holtorf on the topic of the gathering. Anders presented his latest work on Museum Entrepreneurship, whereas Cornelius discussed the experiences of our Research School GRASCA.

Due to the pandemic, some presentations were pre-recorded this year.

 

International Day of Monuments and Sites

2021-04-18

18 April is the International Day of Monuments and Sites, coordinated by ICOMOS. This year the theme is “Complex Pasts – Diverse Futures”.

Our UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures participates in the International Programme, representing Sweden, with a digital exhibition entitled Balloon Head: Iran’s Constitutional Revolution Reconfigured and curated by Leila Papoli-Yazdi.

Focusing on Iran’s Mashrouteh (Constitutional) Revolution, Ali Roustaeeyanfard’s paintings reconfigure historical photographs of complex historic events and processes at the beginning of the 20th century.

By adding colourful anachronistic details to the original motifs of the photographs his work depicts unimagined futures and the need to re-narrate the past in every present. The paintings illustrate that there are unexpected and diverse futures, both of the past and of the tangible heritage that reminds us of the past in the present. Roustaeeyanfard’s hope is to revive the forgotten heritage and history of voiceless people in order to fulfil their original dream of achieving freedom and progress through the Revolution.

 

Can we predict the future?

2021-04-17

During the 2021 International Swedish Science Festival, one session was dedicated to the question “Can we predict the future?” (in Swedish).

Eight academics from Gothenburg University and Chalmers Technical University presented short lectures on perspectives from their various subjects, predicting everything from national elections, food, the stock market, and human behaviour, and discussing the impact of robots, future leadership, and whom to trust. 

Although the social sciences were well represented, references to the humanities and the cultural sector were conspicuously absent. I am waiting for the way when it will be self-evident for more historians, classicists, literary scholars, philosophers and others in the humanities to consider the future. 

Cultural heritage and the European Green Deal

2021-04-15

Cornelius Holtorf was interviewed by Sorina Buzatu for youris.com, an independent non-profit media agency promoting European innovation via TV media and the web. Her article is about cultural heritage and sustainability in the context of the European Green Deal, in which the words “heritage”, “art”, “culture” and “landscape” do not appear.

The article, published on 15 April 2021, discusses to what extent cultural heritage challenges or contributes to a sustainable future (read it here or here). Holtorf is quoted asking 

“What kind of cultural heritage will be needed in the next 20 to 30 years in order to make the life better? What can we do today about the heritage to maximise its benefit for the future? In some cases, that entails preservations, while in others, it demands us to choose some heritage more than others, or to create new heritage over time.”