Invited talk for a new seminar series at the University of York Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre, 6 October 2023
“Sustainability and the Crisis of Inheritance: Heritage Making in ‘End Times’”
This wide-ranging talk will address the profound shifts currently occurring within and beyond the heritage field in response to environmental breakdown and the climate crisis. Drawing on a series of recent and ongoing projects (both teaching and research) related to museums, sustainability, ecology and critical heritage – and building on theoretical insights from multiple disciplines – the talk will argue that thinking differently about inheritance and heritage making can help us to understand and potentially confront the enormous challenges of a warming world. To develop this argument, I critically engage with the problematic trope of “end times” – a thematic that, I suggest, can tell us much about the limitations of mainstream sustainability discourse and clarify the need for new heritage paradigms fit for an era of compound intersecting transitions (social, environmental, technological and political).
Details on the Centre website.
Many thanks to Professor Emma Waterton for the invitation to speak in this series.
Colin Sterling 