Susan Ashley

This chapter examines one sector of that cultural production within Canadian policy and institutions-the "heritage industry." The term was coined in the 1980s in response to the decline of the British industrial economy and the subsequent museumification of buildings and landscapes for tourism purposes (Hewison). The heritage industry preserves past forms of cultural economy, and stores and presents those old ways of functioning while new cultural modes of cultural production evolve. This industry includes both public institutions and private enterprises-parks, galleries, and museums as well as living-history sites, zoos, or science centres-all key to tourism and entertainment economies worldwide. Not only locations for representations and products about nature, culture, and the past, these heritage institutions and businesses are sites for popular cultural expressions and for creative labour in today's post-industrial environments. This network that makes up the heritage industry generates official or "authorized" discourses and representations on what is and was "valuable" about nature, culture, and the past (Smith). In Canada for example, heritage narratives are celebratory accounts of wilderness settlers, heroic pasts, comfortable multicultural tolerance, and global citizenship. Such meanings, and their social and economic uses, are rife with intersectional inequalities. The heritage industry in Canada and internationally has perpetuated sector-wide erasures, misrecognition, lack of parity, and processes of power and precarity that limit access to decision-making and employment. This chapter asks, how and why and to what effect do cultural policies, organisations, and practices assign value to aspects of the past as "our heritage"? How do political and economic decision-making about heritage affect how we define Canadian identity and who belongs? Who makes these decisions about value, and who might be left out? The chapter outlines the ways that heritage has been used in Canada over the years to support the nation-state and economic development, including the relation of heritage to multiculturalism policies. Two examples illustrate how cultural meanings are produced through heritage policies and institutions: the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada's largest institution devoted to heritage, and public community exhibitions and memorials developed within the federal Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP). Both legitimize a celebratory official heritage through policies, systems, and

This chapter is based on recent AHRC-UK research into the ways that Black and minority ethnic organisations in the North of England engage with their heritage through their own cultural organisations. This heritage-making is analysed as 'borderwork' located outside of mainstream cultural organisations: as 'boundary-making' and/or as 'contact zone'. The chapter offers critical insights into heritage work as an affective process by minoritized people who use the past or traditions to express creatively their place within the world, and strategically assert their voices in the public sphere. It concludes with reflections on the research process among motivated participants, and the impact and potential of 'collected' heritage shared in networked relationships. This chapter discusses heritage, broadly defined, and the networks of Black and ethnic minority cultural organisations that address heritage-related issues. I ask questions about why, how and for whom such organisations operate, taking a 'cultural democracy' approach as per Mulcahy, rather than institutional 'democratising of culture' (Mulcahy 2006). By this I mean, studying how people on the ground engage with culture and heritage on their own terms through their own activities, rather than how mainstream institutions disseminate and assist access to pre-inscribed ideas about culture and heritage. As Hadley & Belfiore noted, such research work tries to circumvent the 'hierarchies of cultural value [that] have always been, and always will be, bound up with questions of power and authority' (2018, p. 222). The research presented here examines the deployment of 'heritage' by Black and minority ethnic groups in the north and northeast of England-people who are immigrants or marginalised by race or ethnicity. The project studied the place of these minority ethnic people within local cultural environments, both in terms of representation and access, and in terms of agency. The research positioned minority-led cultural activities at the centre of enquiry, rather than as an adjunct to mainstream museums' social engagement work. The project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, was called '(Multi)Cultural Heritage: New Perspectives on Public Culture, Identity and Citizenship'. It asked, what are the ways that minority ethnic cultural organisations express and engage with heritage; what are the aims and challenges of those

[My submitted version prepublication]
This chapter looks at the re-visioning stimulated by Renaissance ROM and assesses the extent to which the museum rethought the “engagement” offered through its exhibition program. It focuses on a high-profile exhibition of 2009 – Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World (DSS) – which the ROM saw as an exemplar of this new vision, a historical topic that could “Engage the World,” bringing together diverse cultures in their interpretation and commemoration. This commitment to public engagement appeared to be a dedication to a democratic positioning, meeting challenging topics head-on in a new conceptualization of the museum’s way of doing business. The chapter explores the nature of the historical consciousness promoted by the museum, especially how ROM management and staff addressed controversial engagements. It inspects the degree to which the ROM was able to rethink its strategies of public engagement when disputes arose regarding the exhibition’s historical narrative. It weighs the implications of engagement positioned as radical but high-risk pedagogy

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialization at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing 'valuations' of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorizes participants' current affective practices as conscious 'past presencing' (Macdonald, 2013), and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.

This article inspects the ways that spaces of war memorialization are organized and reorganized through official and unofficial meaning-making activities. It aims to contribute to the discussion of the ‘value’ of memorializing by examining a multifaceted space of remembrance and commemoration: the Chattri Indian Memorial built near Brighton, UK. The article brings postcolonial perspectives to explore how memorializing has been organized here, focusing on the activities of once-colonized people and the affective, embodied aspects of organizing practices. Built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought in WWI, the Chattri evolved from a colonial instrument to symbol and space for ethnic-Indian group activities. The study employed historical, visual and ethnographic methods to study the tangible monument and the changing nature of the memorializing activities carried out around the monument. Memorializing is conceptualized within three inter-related processes: colonizing, de-colonizing and re-colonizing to examine how forms and practices of memorialization constitute a values-laden organizing system.

This paper explores ‘museum-making’ as a particular mode of cultural production outside of mainstream institutions by which immigrant communities make sense of and reconfigure their ideas about heritage, identity and citizenship.  While ‘heritage’ and ‘citizenship’ are two typical social imaginaries used by people to define their collective identity, global flows challenge the nature and importance of ethnic or nation-based interpretations of both concepts in an increasingly multicultural Canada. This article studies how the role, form and practices of museums are adopted and adapted by minority or ethnic groups to serve public communicative and pedagogical goals. Museum-making and in-public practices of exhibitioning have become one form of media by which minority groups make sense of their new world and their place within it, as well as strategically assert their voices in the public sphere. The negotiation of heritage and citizenship is explored through two examples, each involving the ‘making’ of museum projects by minority Canadians: the Sikh Heritage Museum developed by B.C. Indo-Canadians and the Solidaridad Museum established by Latin American immigrants in Toronto. In these cases minority groups, defined in the Canadian context by race or ethnicity, struggle to re-think heritage within a complex social imaginary of citizenship. By making museums, minority groups negotiate and represent cultural difference, but also articulate cohesion to a collective polity in their new homelands. Heritage is negotiated, consolidated and asserted as a desire to fit in with existing narratives; as a re-articulation of identity within a broader, transnational group formulation; and/or as an imagining of citizenship as political solidarity within a new, multicultural location and community.  Contact the author for a copy of this chapter: susan.ashley@northumbria.ac.uk

This module explores the context of and teaches the skills for utilising complex forms of media to enhance participation within the arts, cultural and heritage sectors. Based on the concept of 'Going Public', the module details the complex of communications, planning and management theories, contexts, environments and audiences related to public media and communications in these sectors. Going Public responds to the urgent need to expand current thinking on how to tackle important social and political issues through culture, arts, and heritage; to actively involve the public in conversations and knowledge-making, and to reconceptualize the mediums needed for public communications.Students will learn from diverse organisations working across cultural and media practice and then focus on a specific live media planning project undertaken as case study.

Northumbria University presents Whose Heritage? a symposium honouring the 20th anniversary of Stuart Hall's landmark address, Whose Heritage? Unsettling 'the Heritage', Re-imagining the post-nation. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/whose-heritage-symposium-with-david-olusoga-and-dawn-walton-tickets-59754736024 This free, one-day event features Keynote speakers David Olusoga (BBC broadcaster and public historian) and Dawn Walton (Eclipse Theatre Artistic Director), plus panels and performances that reflect on Stuart Hall's project to challenge inequalities in the culture and heritage fields.

This symposium examines the construction and performance of cultural heritage in South Asian diaspora communities in Canada. Panelists bring critical perspectives on how and why 'heritage' is important in grassroots settings, and whose heritage is omitted from the Canadian historical record. How does diasporic heritage challenge issues-such as the term South Asian, or the term Canadian? We invite a broad range of scholars and practitioners working in areas that touch on the South Asian experience in Canada, to consider how diasporic meaning-making might contribute to official and unofficial expressions of heritage.

Northumbria University presents Whose Heritage? a symposium honouring the 20th anniversary of Stuart Hall's landmark address, Whose Heritage? Unsettling 'the Heritage', Re-imagining the post-nation. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/whose-heritage-symposium-with-david-olusoga-and-dawn-walton-tickets-59754736024 This free, one-day event features Keynote speakers David Olusoga (BBC broadcaster and public historian) and Dawn Walton (Eclipse Theatre Artistic Director), plus panels and performances that reflect on Stuart Hall's project to challenge inequalities in the culture and heritage fields.