UNESCO

Chair on Heritage Futures

Constructing heritage for future-making

2025-10-16

On 11 March 2011, Eastern Japan was hit by a triple disaster caused by the combination of the impacts of an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Many people lost their lives, their homes, or their livelihoods, and are still affected by the aftermath now.

Figure 1: Central area of the Disaster Memorial Park under construction in Futaba, Fukushima

Over fourteen years later, the region most affected is now covered by a plethora of topical museums, exhibitions, memorial stones, and even some largescale memorial parks that either opened over the last few years or are still under construction. They all do not only aim at recalling what happened but also intend to create a better future.

Figure 2: 3.11 Densho Road connecting disaster memorial facilities in Eastern Japan

I first explored the topic on an exploratory trip to Fukushima Prefecture (with Tomas Nilsson and Tom Holtorf) in spring 2023. Now I was able to return for some days in connection with a NEA (OECD) conference on Nuclear Waste Management I participated in in Yokohama. I could even spend two days in Miyagi Prefecture this time. I am more than ever convinced that Eastern Japan provides a good case for studying the role of cultural heritage in negotiating the relations between present and future societies, i.e. what we call heritage futures.

Figure 3: Display in the Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum in Futaba, Fukushima


I found evidence that remembering the 3.11-Disaster related present and future societies in at least the following interrelating but different ways:

1. Restoring and continuing after hiatus

  • Restoring shrines and other cultural heritage to reconnect with the past for the future
  • Passing down memories and lessons of the disaster to protect lives around the world in the future, e.g. building higher seawalls and promoting tsunami alert response (e.g. memorial facilities along 3.11 Densho Road)
  • Expressing personal memories of the disaster to continue life
  • Revitalizing the region by promoting and rebuilding economic development, e.g. through high-tech and tourism (e.g. Great East Japan Earthquake and Nuclear Disaster Memorial Museum in Futaba)

2. Making up for past failure

  • Accepting apologies and accountability that come with the responsibility to make up for the damage (Tepco)
  • Honouring the victims forever (memorial stones)

3. Finding a better way forward

  • Increasing resilience by improving the human ability to embrace loss, change, transformation, adaptation and renewal in the future (e.g. inspired by Sakura, the reoccurring cherry blossoming)
  • Learning from the mistakes of modernity and capitalism to create a more sustainable society for the future.

4. Restarting and regenerating life

  • Partial forgetting of the disaster in order to move on with new life (e.g. resprouting of burned trees, see Figure 4)
  • International support and joint remembering as an opportunity for connecting people around the world (Ishinomaki City Kadonowaki Elementary School exhibit)
  • Recovering from the disaster to regenerate our lives for the future refocusing human priorities (e.g. some eye-witness storytelling).

Figure 4: a tree outside Ishinomaki City Kadonowaki Elementary School burned by the disaster in 2011 but now resprouting with new life

In sum, preliminary outcomes of my fieldwork reveal how past, present, and future can be strongly interconnected: the way we tell the past in the present strongly correlates with our assumptions and anticipations of the future. This becomes particularly pertinent in the case of the 3.11.-Disaster which brought about extensive losses of lives and livelihoods, including entire town areas and much essential infrastructure.

The future we are building today in the aftermath of the disaster depends on how we describe and remember what actually happened, e.g. by constructing cultural heritage sites, as currently happens in the area affected by the 3.11 disaster along the Japanese East Coast. There are different ways of recalling the disaster and different futures following on from that. That is why cultural heritage is of great importance in future-making, and why heritage futures matter in the present.

All timescales on the agenda

2025-10-08

I attended and contributed to a global Symposium on Information, Data, and Knowledge Management for Radioactive Waste, organised by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) for the OECD in Yokohama, Japan (7-10 October 2025). Over 100 participants attended from Japan and around the world.

From the conference blurb (shortened): radioactive waste is produced in all phases of the nuclear fuel cycle and from the use of radioactive materials in industrial, medical, defence and research applications. After creation and use, many countries have a policy of interim storage, followed by permanent disposal underground in engineered repositories located in suitable geological formations. Significant quantities of data and information are generated throughout this lifecycle with many countries now exploring the concept of a digital safety case. The operational period of nuclear generation facilities often covers several decades, while disposal facilities are designed to operate for even longer. This raises significant challenges as these timeframes span multiple generations of workers and are likely to see many changes in policy and technology. Moreover, even after disposal, there is now a consensus on the importance of adopting strategies to preserve awareness of waste and disposal facility for long periods of time. The NEA Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management (WP-IDKM) [to which Anders Högberg and Cornelius Holtorf belong] aims to co-ordinate these activities in a more holistic way, considering cross-disciplinary approaches and cognizant of all timescales of the information cycle. 

The conference addressed “Challenges Across All Timescales”, from imminent expert retirement to one million years and more in the future. This is about Heritage Futures for real!

I presented the following paper:

Heritage Futures: Archaeological Insights for the Long-term Management of Radioactive Waste

Managing radioactive waste is a challenge that extends across many generations, requiring long-term safety measures. Archaeologists, like myself, are familiar with time scales of thousands of years as we seek to understand the distant past. A key part of our work involves questioning assumptions rooted in the present and learning to imagine past worlds that were vastly different from today. This is very difficult, but only after doing so can we draw meaningful insights from the past to inform the present. The same principles should apply when communicating information, knowledge, and guidance about radioactive waste repositories to societies of distant futures. This calls for a strengthened capacity in futures literacy,’ a concept developed and promoted by UNESCO. Futures literacy consists of three core dimensions: 1. Becoming aware of the assumptions we hold about the future, 2. Learning to imagine multiple alternative futures, and 3. Reframing the original issue and developing new strategies to address it. In this paper, I explore this argument and discuss its implications for a long-term, safe and responsible management of radioactive waste. The paper is based on extensive research conducted by the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. The research has been carried out in collaboration with the radioactive waste sector in Sweden and internationally, including through participation in several expert groups of the NEA.

Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism

2025-10-03

Today, we started a joint project with the University’s Knowledge Environment for Sustainable Tourism (KEST) with A Round Table on Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism (led by my colleague Marianna Strzelecka).

Some 20 participants from many regional organisations (Mörbylånga kommun, Region Kalmar län, Destination Kalmar, Länsstyrelsen Kalmar län, Kalmar läns museum, Ölands museum, Ölands turistbyrå, Karlskrona kommun och Linnéuniversitetet) discussed challenges under three headings:

1. Co-creating the Southern Öland landscape: How farmers, local communities, tourism actors, and other stakeholders can collaborate to sustain and benefit from the World Heritage landscape.

2. Mobilities to and within Öland: Exploring sustainable transportation options for visitors, residents, and goods while respecting the island’s unique cultural and natural values.

3. Managing local natural resources under pressure: Addressing challenges such as water availability and climate change impacts.

There was also one cross-cutting theme: Agricultural landscapes as pathways to peace and dialogue. How the Southern Öland heritage landscape can foster understanding, cooperation, and peaceful relations through shared stewardship of land and traditions.

The project will continue this autumn with student fieldwork and a joint futures workshop at the end. Exciting with local and regional collaborations!

MONDIACULT 2025 – A commentary and analysis

2025-10-01

MONDIACULT – UNESCO’s World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development took place in Barcelona (29 Sept-1 Oct 2025). UNESCO is the United Nations organization that promotes cooperation in education, science, culture and communication to foster peace, security and sustainable development worldwide. “Culture of Peace” has long been one of UNESCO’s most memorable concepts.

With this in mind, it was surprising that at MONDIACULT there were Ministers of Culture that emphasized culture as the soul of a country and an expression of national freedom, the need for cultural preparedness in the face of military threats, and cultural policy as a form of survival, security and defence strategy, not the least because foreign forces are known to attack first the cultural fabric that binds societies together.

Such language is very different from the general commitment of all states not only to UNESCO as such, including its Culture of Peace programme, but also to cultural rights as a part of global human rights. The logic of war must not trump culture. As Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights, emphasized several times during the conference, cultural rights are about the rights of individuals and groups: they oblige states to implement the rights of minorities, marginalized people and migrants, among others, not to foster or support majority state culture. I would add that culture should not be what sustains people when everything else is taken away from them, but what prevents states or anybody from taking away everything from anyone in the first place.

Similarly surprising to me was that some of the discussions were still about protecting and preserving cultural heritage or returning it to their rightful owners. This is a perspective of culture as a valuable resource and property, something you don’t want to be deprived of as that would mean, according to some, that you lost your “heartbeat” and your past. This is a familiar view that is sometimes also taken regarding cultural heritage. But it chimes poorly with the many statements we heard during the conference that culture is primarily about our common humanity. Indeed, UNESCO’s very constitution from 1945 discusses culture in the context of a general human (and not the nations’) dignity.

There is one additional aspect to this. When some policy makers declared in Barcelona that culture must be safeguarded because “culture is who we are”, I partly disagree. In many respects, the world is not in a good state because of who we were, and are. Culture is also about who we would like to be, or perhaps become, as human beings on our shared planet. That is why it was disappointing to see that MONDIACULT 2025 did not take up the spirit of the 2024 United Nations Summit of the Future and improve on the recognition of culture in the Pact for the Future.

Today, humanity is at a time of profound global transformation, requiring us to change course so that we do not risk tipping into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown. But what exactly does this mean for cultural heritage which is the way in which we today recall the past? After all, as the Spanish Minister of Culture had it at MONDIACULT, “culture is where all changes begin” – it is about transformation, innovation and creativity. In other words, the question is not how to safeguard culture and heritage ahead of threats that may be anticipated in an uncertain future. One key question is rather how we make sense of the past in a world where the future is not what it used to be (as Marek Tamm once wrote). Culture has some of the answers: long-term thinking, embracing change, and understanding what it means to be human.

Finally, what is the way forward? Senior decision-makers emphasized on several occasions the need of evidence-based policy and the benefits of culture for meeting indicators of environmental, economic, and social development as well as for fostering national identities and even as an asset for national defence. But this does not fit very well to Pedro Sanchez, Prime Minister of Spain, declaring in his Opening Speech that “culture invites us to dream”. Similarly, Octavio Paz was quoted as saying that the world is a projection of our images and, one might add, of our narratives and worldviews. Others talked in this context about a holistic perspective we need to take—one that not the least integrates culture and nature. According to that view, we do not benefit from culture when it is part of a fragmented and siloed view of the world, sought to be instrumentalized for various purposes, and regularly assessed for its value, in particular its contribution to gross domestic product (GDP).

Instead, the kind of culture that gives us hope in the present time is what provides happiness and wellbeing for people. That is why we need to develop and implement measures of progress for human work that go beyond GDP. Culture can be the place where such change begins.

Cornelius Holtorf, UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden

MONDIACULT 2025

I spent a week in Barcelona to attend MONDIACULT – UNESCO’s World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development (29 Sept-1 Oct 2025). I arrived early to take part in the Civic Agora organised in Barcelona (26-27 Sept 2025).

Both events provided many opportunities to learn about current developments in global cultural policy and also to talk to other UNESCO Chairs, senior politicians, policy makers, and representatives of NGOs about various dimensions of heritage futures.

MONDIACULT attracted more than 100 Ministers of Culture and overall more than 1,200 participants from around the world.

Highlights included several brilliant presentations by Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights. She emphasized the responsibility of states for cultural rights of individuals and groups, while criticizing states caring only about majority cultures and marginalising minorities and people at the margin of society.

Another highlight was the launch av Version 1 for a Culture Goal av Culture2030Goal campaign. Such a goal is very strongly supported by the Ministers of Cultures, and policy makers attending MONDIACULT, as reflected in the Outcome Document. Also significant was the launch of the UNESCO Global Report on Cultural Policies. These documents are the basis for further discussions among various NGOs over he coming years and will serve to influence the UN member states in favour of giving culture a strong position on the Post-2030 Agenda.

(Figure shows the Swedish Delegation incl Secretary of State)

I was able to have many conversations on heritage futures (short and long!), and will be following up many of them, including with the following people:

Politicians and government representatives

UNESCO

NGOs etc

UNESCO Chairs

  • Vicky Karaiskou, UNESCO Chair on Visual Anticipation and Futures Literacy towards Visual Literacy, Cyprus
  • Roland Benedikter, UNESCO Chair in Interdisciplinary Anticipation and Global-Local Transformation, Italy
  • Alicja Jagielska-Burduk, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Law, Poland
  • Julius Heinecke, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy for the Arts in Development, Germany
  • Chiara Bortolotto, UNESCO Chair in Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development, France

Various activities July – September 2025

2025-09-30

Cornelius Holtorf contributed to the ICOMOS questionnaire entitled “A Spot on the Horizon: Reflecting on the Future of the Heritage Field and ICOMOS’ Role in It!” (1 August 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf had an informal meeting with Dr Paulius Jurčys of Prifina about creating an AI twin for the Chair on Heritage Futures (20 August 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf presented a talk entitled “Public Archaeology and the challenge of long-term communication lessons for nuclear waste management” in a session on “The Power of Public Archaeology to Tackle the Sustainable Development Goals” organised by Lenore Thompson and Veronica Testolini at the 31st Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists held online (4 September 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf held an informal background conversation with journalist Nicke Nordmark preparing a programme on communicating about repositories of nuclear waste for Swedish Radio “Morning on P1” (8 September 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf discussed the question “Can archaeology do harm in present society?” with a class in Ethical Dilemmas in Contemporary Anthropology taught by Professor Laura McAtackney at University College Cork, Ireland (10 September 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf had an informal meeting with Steven Hartman, Executive Director, UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition, about future collaborations (10 September 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf was interviewed about long-term communication regarding nuclear waste repositories on the national Swedish radio programme “Morning on P1” (22 September 2025).

Cornelius Holtorf was invited to present a talk on “Varför kultur och kulturarv ska tjäna fred och inte krig” for an audience of 60+ civil servants and politicians at a conference on Kultur- och fritidsområdets roll i kris och beredskap in Jönköping, Sweden (23 September).

A Heritage Futures Voice at NY Climate Week

2025-09-29

Marcy Rockman, visiting researcher with the UNESCO Chair for Heritage Futures, spoke in a live-stream hosted by the climate action group We Don’t Have Time from Stockholm to NY Climate Week on September 24, 2025.

The event focused on the dismantling of climate change science in the US and what can be done broadly to rebuild trust and craft new paths of action. It began with Marcy describing the sequence of events that brought her to Sweden. She shared some of her experiences as lead for climate change and cultural heritage with the US National Park Service, a role that was dissolved under the first Trump administration, and then how capacity to do her subsequent work at the intersection of climate, heritage, and policy was decimated under the start of the second Trump term. She then noted her connections with the UNESCO Chair and how their successful application to the Swedish Research Council for a visiting researcher grant. She said, “I had to say no to giving a talk in Sweden and this turned into an opportunity to move to Sweden. I’m beyond heartsick at all that is happening in the US now, I also know I’m deeply lucky to be here.”

Maria Bergkvist, deputy director of Klimatklubben was also part of the event. Klimatklubben is an organization working to bring people together across Sweden to talk about climate change and take action together. Klimatklubben has started a new initiative organized around a study published earlier this year that found that a high percentage (greater than 75%) of people around the world want their governments to take more action in response to climate change, but a much smaller percentage talk about climate change with friends and family.

Although they came be part of the panel from different directions, both Marcy and Maria spoke about the power and importance of bringing people together locally and connecting with each other in a place, and that such gatherings and connections are essential to rebuilding trust and relationships. As well, Marcy found it encouraging that We Don’t Have Time and everyone involved considered research in heritage and the social science underlying the work of Klimatklubben to be essential parts of climate science and climate response.

A recording of the full panel is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/BMu36rxDECo

Meeting of UNESCO Chairs

2025-09-26

On 26 September 2025, I took part in a virtual meeting of the UNESCO Futures Literacy and Foresight Chairs, where the new Head of Section (the Management of Social Transformation Programme, MOST), Irakli Khodeli, and the new Head of Unit of Futures Literacy and Foresight, Clare Stark, presented their new priorities and discussed collaboration with the ca 20 (of a total of 36) Chairs represented in the meeting.

In general terms, the MOST programme aims at bringing the knowledge of the Social Sciences and Humanities to policy-making (which fits perfectly with our aims of the UNESCO Chair on Futures Literacy).

Among the planned and ongoing initiatives of UNESCO where FLF Chairs are expected to be involved are the World Futures Day Celebrations on 2 December 2025, a Signals Report on what lies on the horizon, and the conceptual development of a Flagship Report on Foresight for policy making, as well as a new UNESCO Futures Blog.

This meeting, bringing together 40+ UNESCO staff and UNESCO Chairs from around the work, exemplified multilateralism in action, noted Irakli Khodeli in the end.

Nuclear waste in a cultural perspective

2025-09-20

Claudio Pescatore (affiliated with the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures) and I took part in the 2025 Interdisciplinary Research Symposium on the Safety of Nuclear Disposal Practices (safeND 2025) held by the German Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management BASE (Bundesamt für die Sicherheit der nuklearen Entsorgung) in Berlin 16-19 September 2025.

The overall theme was “Time as a safety factor: opportunities and challenges of timely nuclear waste disposal“. It quickly became clear that this focus was inspired by the perceived need to accelerate the decision-making process to identify the site location for Germany’s repository of high-level nuclear waste. But the topics discussed during the symposium were much wider and covered perspectives from many different disciplines bringing up a wide range of issues, not the least the issue of radioactive waste resulting from uranium mining that has not always been formally included into the discussions of nuclear waste. Claudio Pescatore led a workshop on this latter topic, based on his recent research.

One highlight was the keynote lecture by Andrew Stirling, University of Sussex and formally a Board Member of Greenpeace. It turned out he was originally an archaeologist! He also made a powerful argument suggesting that the objective of finding “the best possible” solution for safe nuclear waste disposal, which the German legislation requires, misses the question whether “the best possible” solution can ultimately be satisfactory.

In my talk (in front of cirka 50 participants), I adopted this question asking whether what many think is “the best possible” way to plan for uncertain future needs is ultimately satisfactory. My point was that taking a cultural perspective linked to the capability of futures literacy can get us further…

Nuclear waste disposal is not only about physical time, safety, technology and social and political acceptance but it is also about long-term thinking, embracing cultural change, and human values and identities that are shifting over time.

Holtorf, C.: Sustainability and long-term processes: a cultural perspective, Third interdisciplinary research symposium on the safety of nuclear disposal practices, Berlin, Germany, 17–19 Sep 2025, safeND2025-6, https://doi.org/10.5194/safend2025-6, 2025.

ABSTRACT

Culture is about how people make sense of the world, of each other, and of themselves. It is diverse in scale, across space, and over time. By implication, expertise on the world, its inhabitants, and ourselves is culturally relative. Indeed, culture is often about managing difference: different ideas, different people, different languages.

Applied to the need to sustain a body of knowledge and guidance for action over the long term, a cultural approach will (have to) embrace the need to adapt to cultural changes and developments. All this means that regarding nuclear waste, what we are tasked with today is transferring to future generations, who will be living in their own cultural contexts, knowledge and guidance for action that will make sense to them, not to us. Proposed messages that lack futures literacy merely perpetuate our own frameworks of meaning and eventually become irrelevant and unsustainable. There are thus good reasons why they say that nothing ages faster than the future, and nothing is more difficult to predict than the past. In this paper, I will discuss some implications of this theoretical argument for geological disposal of radioactive waste.

Beyond fear of the future concerning heritage

2025-09-02

I listened today to the keynote lecture by Tatjana Cvjetićanin during the Opening session of the Annual Conference of the European Association of Archaeologists in 2025. She has been the Director of the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade (2003-2012).

In her lecture, Cvjetićanin asked whether archaeological heritage really always provides benefits for the future, whether it is sensible to do archaeological “hoarding” of finds in collections, and why we always have to fear the future for perpetual crises of endangerment of archaeological heritage.

Instead, she referred to the Heritage Futures project (Harrison et al 2020) and emphasized archaeologists’ responsibility to work with the public for the public, described the nature of their work as ‘heritage-making’, and insisted on the temporally and spatially variable value of archaeological heritage.

Very interesting to follow in lectures like this one how heritage futures are gradually becoming mainstream in Archaeology… 🙂