UNESCO

Anders Högberg participated at “Höstmötet”, an annual conference arranged by the Swedish National Heritage Board https://www.raa.se/evenemang-och-upplevelser/hostmotet/program/

Anders was invited to present and discuss at a workshop on EU´s heritage work and policies and how it can change to accommodate new knowledge and actions needed for future social sustainability.

Anders Högberg, Professor of Archaeology, UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

A new report covers the fifth year of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University. Among the highlights of the year were several global initiatives to which our Chair could contribute with a distinctive perspective on heritage futures. The Chair’s membership of the Climate Heritage Network provides an important context for some of this work.

The basic idea is explained for everybody in this animation. Understand why futures thinking matters for cultural heritage management (2 min, English with subtitles, 2022). Available on the Chair’s YouTube channel: ‘Heritage Futures’ youtube.com/@HeritageFutures

Please get in touch if you have any comments or suggestions!

View the Report (issuu)
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Team of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures

The Millennium Project, a global participatory think tank with 70 “Nodes” around the world has published its report: Five UN Foresight Elements of Our Common Agenda: Results of a Real-Time Delphi Study.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued Our Common Agenda, a bold report on UN reforms that includes five foresight elements; these elements were assessed by The Millennium Project. The five elements are:

• UN Futures Lab
• UN Summit on the Future
• UN Envoy for Future Generations
• Periodic UN Strategic Foresight and Global Threats reports
• Re-purposed UN Trusteeship Council as a Multi-Stakeholder Foresight Body

a global study of 189 futurists and others from 54 countries. I was one of the contributors.

Monday 26 September Anders Högberg was involved in arranging a workshop in Kalmar. At a well visited event (c. 25 persons) with students from Archaeology and Heritage Studies and also Leila Papoli-Yazdi and Emily Hanscam from the Heritage Futures chair in the audience, aspects of ´Inclusion and diversity in the heritage field’ was discussed. Sarah May presented on ‘Heritage, negotiating change, negotiating power’ and Cornelius Holtorf presented on the theme ‘From diversity to variation: human identity reconsidered’.

The intellectual set-up for the workshop was this:

Top-down initiatives aimed at promoting social inclusion within the Scandinavian heritage field have created dominant narratives of community cohesion, by drawing upon notions of unity presented as pre-existing. Essentialistic ideas of ‘rooted’ cultures, linked to shared histories and places of origin, provide individuals and groups with a sense of continuity and belonging. Embedded with assumptions concerned with nostalgia and consensus, such concepts work to construct and divide society into assumed homogeneous collectives. Efforts over the last two decades to extend the span of how cultural heritage is typified to recognize diversity, have not in themselves challenged inbuilt power relations, traditional narratives or the processes by which heritage is defined and given meaning. Recent strategies of minority inclusion involve an increased emphasis on the recognition and valorization of alternatives ‘from below’. Central is the notion that official heritage institutions and practitioners should act less like experts with authenticating authority, and instead adopt roles of facilitators and enablers. In this workshop we investigate how we can further develop such approaches.

The workshop was initiated and organised by Kaja Hannedatter Sontum from The Future Past: Bridging Public Administration, Academia and Schools, a research and dissemination project within HEI: Heritage Experience Initiative at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Gustav Wollentz from The Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity in Östersund, Sweden, and Anna S. Beck from the project The Timeline. Applied Archaeology in Køge Nord at Museum Southeast Denmark, together with Anders Högberg at the Department of Cultural Sciences and the UNESCO Chair of Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University. The event was hosted by The Centre for Applied Heritage, Linnaeus University.

Gustav Wollentz, Anders Högberg, Sarah May and Kaja Hannedatter Sontum.

Cornelius Holtorf was invited to present in a Plenary on Wars, Conflicts, Crises, and Archaeologies at the World Archaeological Congress 9 in Prague, Czech Republic, on the question “How can world archaeological heritage contribute to a better future for all?” (5 July 2022).

During the World Archaeological Congress 9 in Prague, Czech Republic, Cornelius Holtorf had meetings about future collaborations with Professor Valentina Figueroa Larre, Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile, Professor Peter Stone, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Protection and Peace at Newcastle University, UK, and Dr Isber Sabrine, Director of the international NGO Heritage for Peace based in Girona, Spain (4-8 July 2022).

Cornelius Holtorf was interviewed by Anne Bergmans of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in the context of the research project “Include” commissioned by the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority on including (local) stakeholder participation in its regulatory mission (18 August 2022).