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seven - Do-it-yourself heritage: heritage as a process (designing for the Stoke ‘Ping’)
- Edited by Helen Graham, University of Leeds, Jo Vergunst, University of Aberdeen
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- Book:
- Heritage as Community Research
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 27 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 13 March 2019, pp 149-170
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
The stage was set: a hidden gem and ‘secret’ space; a pool of tiles, different colours and shapes. Across the room was a cascade of ceramic fragments. Further away from the entrance was a bookcase full of books and pamphlets. Buckets and scrapers were positioned around the walls. Tea and cakes stood ready to be served on beautifully patterned, eclectically mismatched services. The day was 27 June 2015 and the occasion was a Do-It-Yourself Heritage Day at Minton Free Library on London Road in Stoke-on-Trent.
We want to take you into the anatomy of this event to introduce the idea of do-it-yourself (DIY) heritage, that is, heritage as it is produced through people's actions, conversations and relationships. Danny Callaghan, Jan Roberts, Jayne Fair and Phil Rowley organised and ran these events under the banner of Ceramic City Stories (other volunteers present included, Simon Ball, Phil Rawle, Jane Wells, Kristian Foster and Steve Shaw). Danny Callaghan was involved with Karen Brookfield (Heritage Lottery Fund [HLF]) and Helen Graham (University of Leeds) in a project ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’. Karen and Helen came to take part in the Do-It-Yourself Heritage Day having visited Danny in Stoke as part of the research project in order to explore and articulate DIY heritage approaches. This chapter is a product both of the ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ research (Bashforth et al, 2015, 2017) and two follow-up conversations in 2016 and 2017. In these conversations, the Ceramic City Stories group reflected with Karen and Helen on the ways in which the group has used the approaches deployed at the Do-It-Yourself Heritage Day events at the Minton Library to grow and to develop ways to collaborate.
Underpinning this article – drawing on current debates in critical heritage studies (Smith, 2006) and community-led research (Burns, 2007; Facer and Enright, 2016) – is an exploration of both ‘heritage’ and ‘knowledge’ as emerging through social processes. Recognising heritage as a process has been a crucial critical intervention; it has challenged the idea of heritage as a value fixed in an object or building through preservation and managed by expert-led organisations on behalf of a public.
Four - Socialising heritage/socialising legacy
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- By Martin Bashforth, Mike Benson, Tim Boon, Lianne Brigham, Richard Brigham, Karen Brookfield, Peter Brown, Danny Callaghan, Jean-Phillipe Calvin, Richard Courtney, Kathy Cremin, Paul Furness, Helen Graham, Alex Hale, Paddy Hodgkiss, John Lawson, Rebecca Madgin, Paul Manners, David Robinson, John Stanley, Martin Swan, Jennifer Timothy, Rachael Turner
- Edited by Keri Facer, University of Bristol, Kate Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University
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- Book:
- Valuing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 05 April 2017, pp 85-106
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
At some point during our inaugural research team workshop we started to generate many different ideas about how to increase participation in heritage decision-making. We tried to keep track as the questions flowed by writing recurring words on pieces of paper, to be linked, connected and ordered at some later point. The words were in some ways not surprising. Heritage, of course. Stewardship. Custodianship. Expert. Leadership. Institutions. Ownership. Differences/Tensions. Scale. Personal. Values. Voice (‘+ not heard’, was added in another hand in biro). So far, so predictable. These words, after all, index the big conceptual challenges that have been identified to a greater or lesser extent in heritage policy, practice and its research for the last four decades. Yet as we spoke, each of these terms started to change in dimension. As the different people around the table gave examples, and checked they understood each other's contributions, the familiar words were in the process of gathering new uncertainties and ambiguities as well as new colours, textures, shapes and potentials.
We were brought together by a funding scheme that supported not just collaborative research, but also its collaborative design. While we did have a shared interest in our overall question ‘how should heritage decisions be made?’, we – as you will see by how we describe ourselves – came to this question, and our first workshop, from quite different places and different trajectories. To frame it in the language implied by this book, we carried with us different inheritances – legacies – from our disciplines, professional backgrounds, organisations and places. As such, the other crucial thing we had in common was an interest in the potential for rethinking ‘heritage’ offered by drawing on many different perspectives and working across hierarchies and institutional boundaries. We used both these shared commitments and our different perspectives to collaboratively design our project.
In this chapter we tell the story of our project with the aim of showing how our research emerged through dynamic connections between know-how generated through practitioner reflections, dialogue, characterised by conversations between us as a project team and conceptual innovation, in terms of the way this allowed us to think about heritage and decision making differently.