UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Sweden’s intangible cultural heritage

2022-08-26

The Nordic Clinker Boat Traditions is Sweden’s only listed UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. Nordic clinker boats are small, open, wooden boats between five and ten metres long.

In connection with the Unika historical Kalmar County project, and on invitation of Västervik Museum, Cornelius Holtorf, Leila Papoli-Yazdi, and Emily Hanscam joined up with Kalmar County Museum’s Maja Heuer to talk to Veronica Palm and Olof Nimhed of Västervik Museum about visions of future development linked to the intangible maritime heritage of Nordic clinker boat building.

We were talking, among other topics, about people-centred aspirations connected with local communities, global sustainable development, and uses of heritage, advancing peace, trust and wellbeing among humans. Political desires to increase Gross National Product (GNP) have begun to be superseded by strategies to enhance Gross National Happiness (GNH). But what might that mean in the context of Västervik, the museum, and boat-building?

 

Prioritise the climate crisis!

2022-08-25

Cornelius Holtorf signed with nearly 2,000 Swedish researchers a call to politicians to give more attention to addressing the challenges of climate change. The call was published in Aftonbladet (25 August 2022).

Som forskare och medborgare är vi arga och förtvivlade över den senaste tidens utveckling. Vi ser hur en majoritet av våra politiska partier överger klimatpolitiken och i stället föreslår eller genomför politik som går stick i stäv med Parisavtalet och Sveriges klimat- och miljömål.

Våra politiker måste ta krisen på allvar och leda omställningen till ett framtida samhälle inom planetens gränser. Forskningen visar att en sådan framtid är möjlig.

Sweden holds national elections in a couple of weeks, and the hope is to make an impact on the priorities of the new government!

Heritage management predicted

2022-08-20

A new paper by Jeffrey Altschul and Terry Klein in the journal Advances in Archaeological Practice predicts an expansion of heritage management in the US until 2031. Their text is entitled “Forecast for the US CRM Industry and Job Market, 2022–2031” and available in open access. They make the following case:

In the next 10 years, the US cultural resource management (CRM) industry will grow in terms of monies spent on CRM activities and the size of the CRM labor force. Between US fiscal years 2022 and 2031, annual spending on CRM will increase from about $1.46 to $1.85 billion, due in part to growth in the US economy but also to an added $1 billion of CRM activities conducted in response to the newly passed infrastructure bill. The increased spending will lead to the creation of about 11,000 new full-time positions in all CRM fields. Archaeologists will be required to fill more than 8,000 positions, and of these, about 70% will require advanced degrees. Based on current graduation rates, there will be a significant MA/PhD-level job deficit.

Futurium Berlin

2022-07-14

Finally I was able to see the Futurium in Berlin. This high-profile government investment is located in the political centre of Berlin, next door to the Ministry of Research and Education of Germany. From the exhibition you have a splendid view of the Parliament, and that is no coincidence.

The content as would be expected – and similar to the equivalent institutions in other countries. It is on the whole a celebration of technology and of political responsibility for the future. It is also about the need to change human behaviour in the name of sustainability addressing some of the difficulties this entails. One of the aims is to influence visitors to do ‘the right thing’.

What is missing, as so often, is a concern with understanding the variability of how human beings make sense of the world, by which values they lead their lives, and what/whom they trust. In my view, such a concern for human culture is needed in any hopeful attempt of governing human societies for the future… Most people (and politicians) lack this view and instead focus on culture in the sense of the arts, as part of the creative industries, the cultural economy, and possibly as belonging to the realm of education.

Various activities April – June 2022

2022-07-06

Cornelius Holtorf responded to the “Call for inputs to a report on cultural rights and sustainable development” by the UN’s Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Alexandra Xanthaki (9 April 2022).

Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg participated in the second meeting of the Expert Group on Awareness Preservation (EGAP) within the project on Information, Data and Knowledge Management (IDKM) at the Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD), held in Gmunden, Austria (26-28 April 2022). They held presentations on “Futures Literacy” and “Heritage Processes” respectively.

Cornelius Holtorf met Vanessa Valentino who is supporting the Demand Generation Alliance (DGA), an international food alliance which is is seeking to shift society-wide preferences towards nutritious and sustainable food by leveraging socio-cultural strategies (5 May 2022).

Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg attended the online workshop on The Time and Temporalities of Nuclear Waste, arranged by Thomas Keating, Linköping University (10 May 2022).

Cornelius Holtorf presented a lecture on “Towards an Archaeology of the Future” for an audience of more than 200 Doctoral students and researchers at the University of Warsaw’s Doctoral School of Humanities, Poland (18 May 2022).

Cornelius Holtorf participated in a workshop “Beyond Dystopia” at Linnaeus University Campus Växjö led by author Mats Söderlund and dedicated to forming a collaborative project involving a digital platform exploring climate change in relation to culture and the arts (19 May 2022).

Cornelius Holtorf reviewed a draft Guidebook on World Heritage Interpretation initiated by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO and offered detailed comments and suggestions for improvement in a coming revision (17 June 2022).
 

Our Common Agenda

2022-06-22

Today I have been contributing to a Real-Time Delphi Study of The Millennium Project on foresight elements of the 2021 UN report Our Common Agenda.

The report makes several suggestions related to foresight. Here are my responses:

A Summit on the Future:

Such a Summit on the Future will draw global attention to foresight and futures thinking generally (much like the Rio Earth summit did).

The Summit on the Future needs to involve more than politicians, lobbyists, expert scientists, and celebrity activists. It should also involve a selection of ordinary people reflecting on their own lives and their cultural practices (I mean cultural in the ethnographic sense describing how people make sense of the world and live their lives accordingly). They will represent the billions of ordinary people.

A UN Futures Lab:

Include the theme of culture and how it may evolve in future decades, e.g. in the context of climate change and resulting migration, urbanisation, longer life expectancy, artificial intelligence, globalism, periodically shifting values. At the moment, culture is ignored in foresight and cultural practitioners ignore foresight themselves – as culture is widely assumed to be timeless (wrongly as we see in hindsight).

A Special Envoy for Future Generations:

Research shows that representatives (proxies) of future generations can sharpen decision-makers’ sensitivity to presentism, i.e. making decisions while assuming that the status quo is timeless and all futures will resemble the present. They can also support long-term thinking in decision-making.

See e.g. Kamijo, Y., Komiya, A., Mifune, N., & Saijo, T. (2017). Negotiating with the future: Incorporating imaginary future generations into negotiations. Sustainability Science, 12(3), 409–420. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-016-0419-8

Otten, M. (2018). Strong external representation of future generations: Legitimate and effective (Unpublished Masters Thesis.) Department of Philosophy, University of Leiden. http://hdl.handle.net/1887/65949 .

Other suggestions:

Introduce Futures as a school subject.

World heritage and looking forward…

2022-06-15

Architect and world heritage expert Roha Khalif recently published a very interesting paper on “Periodic Reporting under the World Heritage Convention: Futures and Possible Responses to Loss” in the journal The Historic Environment.

Partly drawing on our work on heritage futures, Khalif proposes

adding future-oriented questions to the questionnaire before the start of the fourth cycle [of the periodic reporting exercise]. This proposal offers actors in the World Heritage system an opportunity to have constructive discussions on futures and possible responses to loss. As a result, periodic reporting may become more forward-looking, proactive, and relevant to the challenges of the twenty-first century, especially climate change.

We will be following her work and may be able to establish some collaboration with Khalif in the future!

Histories of the Future

2022-06-14

For a number of years I had been wondering why my historian colleagues did not seem to care very much about ever applying their many skills to making sense of the future as much as of the past. Both past and future are after all directly linked in the present.

Now a very nice looking book on Historical Understanding – Past, Present, and Future has been published that breaks new ground into exactly that direction. And I am very glad I could contribute with an essay on “Periodization of the future” …

Climate Ruins

2022-05-23

‘Carbon Ruins’ is an exhibition project aiming to transport the visitor into a future where transitions to post-fossil society has already happened. The project is the result of several initiatives at Lund University, most notably the Narrating Climate Futures Initiative, the Climaginaries project and the think tank LU Futura.

Here is the pretext of the exhibition.

It is 2053. The Swedish government has just opened its landmark museum FOSSIL with its first exhibition Carbon Ruins. The exhibition and its grand opening is a celebration of the fact that global net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide were reached in 2050. Sweden, in line with its 2017 targets, reached net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases already in 2045, being the first country in the world to step out of the fossil era, which globally lasted between 1849 and 2049.

Intriguing, especially from a perspective informed by archaeology and cultural heritage (which does not seem to have informed the design of the exhibition)! I hope to be able to see it one day…

Collaboration with Tehran

2022-05-18

We agreed today on a new collaboration of our UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures with the UNESCO Category II Centre on Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in West and Central Asia at Tehran, Iran. Concrete activities will be subject to the availability of resources for implementing them.

The Tehran Centre had approached us initially in connection with a planned translation into Farsi of our volume Cultural Heritage and the Future (co-edited by Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg in 2021 for Routledge).