This book presents new ways of understanding heritage and heritage work. It addresses the ways physical processes of creation, maintenance and decay are entangled with cultural and political processes of management, access and care.
The book analyzes a critical practice of heritage work oriented to recognizing and collaborating with diverse knowledge holders and their practices of caring for heritage. This requires rethinking accepted heritage concepts, such as heritage management, artifact, site and the definition of heritage itself. The book presents an engaging and applied approach to this task through examples that include Majapahit statues and temples in Indonesia, skating in London, an online heritage movement, building bivouacs in Australia, First Nations advocacy for Country and batik collections in the Netherlands.
Offering a new model for collaborative heritage research and analysis, this book will be of interest to researchers, students and practitioners. Drawing from developments from the posthumanities, cultural geography and critical heritage studies, it presents a collaborative mode of scholarship and writing that considers how people care for and use the things history leaves them.