FREE LECTURE: Archaeology Seminar - "Horse of another colour?" Heritage studies and the critical turn - Dr. Kynan Gentry

In 2012 the newly established Association of Critical Heritage Studies appealed for a critical turn in heritage scholarship, calling on its members to ‘critically engage with the proposition that heritage studies needs to be rebuilt from the ground up’, and that this required the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’ – the last phrase of course, referencing Marx. In doing so, the Association formalised a turn towards the critical that had been slowly growing in heritage scholarship circles since the late 1990s, and which sought to broaden the focus of heritage studies from an emphasis on practice and heritage fundamentally being about being about ‘the preservation of the past for future generations’, to one that stressed the inherently political nature of heritage as a process. This seminar – based on research undertaken in collaboration with Professor Laurajane Smith (ANU) – seeks to explore the supposed ‘need’ for a critical turn in heritage scholarship, and in doing so, also explores the utility of the tradition heritage canon to the critical heritage project.