Session: #116

Regular session

The COVID-19 pandemic functioned as a catalyst in helping cultural heritage (CH) management professionals to adopt and experiment with new management and engagement models, for which there is a growing need. On one hand, safeguarding cultural heritage, increasingly under threat due to anthropogenic activity and physical disasters, with climate change emerging as a key component, calls for an urgent global rethinking of the ways we manage our heritage assets. On the other hand, the sudden loss of contact and engagement possibilities with physical audiences and the public forced on a sudden reorientation in the ways these contacts could be maintained in meaningful ways.
The “new normal”, as shaped out during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighted new technologies and new ways of engagement as the way forward: new or improved ways of providing on-line access to shared CH assets, working together with communities in valorising CH, innovative methodologies of CH management, hybrid procedures for social involvement, and new models of scientific collaboration. That this is the way, is supported by several CH management charters and conventions, which have advocated for expanded public participation and open data/open access processes, leading to the implementation of new participatory cultural practices and the formation of new management paradigms. We are still only beginning to understand the value and impact of such approaches.
In order to both understand the value as well as the challenges in new CH management models for post-pandemic societies, this session is inviting contributions to examine e.g.:
-How the sector has responded to the need for new approaches in access and management
-How the role of professionals in the cultural sector has been re-shaped
-What new public engagement methods and processes have been developed
-What the new heritage narratives are which can be shaped in participatory processes

Cultural heritage, Climate change, New technologies, Open access/Open data, Public archaeology, CH narratives

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Athina Chroni (Greece) ^1,2

Pirjo Hamari (Finland) ³
Bonnie Nilhamn (Netherlands) ^4,5