Theme:
3. The Life of Archaeological Heritage in Society
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Churches as Resources for Society ? Co-Creating Knowledge and Capturing Social Value
Content:
Across Europe churches have been enduring local institutions, representing a source of information about the past as well as a paradigmatic instance of archaeological heritage in society. Christianity is a global faith, practised locally: churches have been engines for the construction of local Christian identities through interactions between a global faith and local social conditions. Christian worship has involved communal participation: churches have been foci for local projections of wealth or social standing, or the exertion of power over local communities. Churches often received land to support the work of clergy and gifts from members of the local community, making them unusually wealthy and long-lived institutions. Churches have thereby become the focus for local settlements and drivers of economic development. The result is that churches always present key evidence for the history of local communities. Yet church buildings and monuments often represent a burden: they are expensive to maintain; they are sometimes sites of worship under ecclesiastical ownership, and sometimes no longer used; the responsibility for them is distributed between national heritage organisations, ecclesiastical bodies, charitable organisations, and local communities. To secure their future, it is necessary to promote an appreciation of them as resources for society. This session is inspired by work for the pan-European project Corpus Architecturae Religiosae Europeae (CARE) in Italy, Britain, and Ireland, where we have collaborated with a range of stakeholders to generate new knowledge and understanding of early medieval churches. This session seeks to share the ways in which the collaboration of different stakeholders – academics, policy makers, educators, charities, members of local communities etc - is tapping new understandings of churches and harnessing appreciation of contemporary social value to bring public benefits. What strategies, such as co-production of resources, are being adopted to bring about such transformations, and what difference are they making?
Keywords:
churches, history, archaeology, heritage, value, stakeholders
Session associated with MERC:
yes
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Thomas Pickles (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Alejandra Chavarria Arnau (Italy) 2
Sally Foster (United Kingdom) 3
Affiliations:
1. University of Chester
2. University of Padua
3. University of Stirling
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