UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Heritage Processes and Nuclear Waste

2021-06-14

Cornelius Holtorf presented at the second 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 Anders Högberg participated.

During the session, held on 14 June 2021, the 30+ participants discussed the significance of understanding human behaviour in all its complexity. In relation to mechanisms of awareness preservation we will need to shift focus: from creating to consuming, from intentions to impacts, and from assets to outcomes. This requires understanding social and cultural processes, and entering the realm of the human sciences, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.

In each specific context anticipated, we need to be asking questions such as

  1. What’s happening?
  2. Who’s involved or affected?
  3. In what socio-cultural context?
  4. With what socio-cultural consequences?

In a second step, we need to learn how to manage processes changing over time: how can we today facilitate certain socio-cultural processes in novel futures which will be changing further with time? This will require not to be creating continuities but to be facilitating discontinuities (constituting meta-continuities). How this can be achieved is a difficult question and there are no ready answers.

Managing Heritage in Times of Crisis

2020-10-17

The ICOMOS 6ISCs Joint Meeting “Advancing Risk Management for the Shared Future” was held virtually on 17 October 2020, assembling ca 100 participants from around the world, with more being able to watch the recording afterwards. The aim of the meeting was to develop risk management for cultural heritage.

Cornelius Holtorf contributed with a paper on “The Significance of Managing Heritage Processes in Times of Crisis” in which he argued that risk management strategies should give more attention to managing processes and practices of heritage.

The paper is available as an oral presentation and in written form as part of the meeting’s proceedings.