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23 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 2

From Stone to Digital Screen

From Stone to Digital Screen
  • Gothic Cathedrals and Local Iconic Churches as Hybrid Media Spaces
  • Damian Guzek
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • Written against the backdrop of ten years of visits and studies in 220 Gothic cathedrals, Gothic iconic local churches, and neo-Gothic cathedrals, this Element examines the idea of historical religious structures as 'hybrid media spaces' using grounded theory and communication and media approaches to capture the processes of communicating and erasing Christian processes of excommunicating in contemporary secular society. They show that at the current pace of societal conditions, cathedrals and iconic churches labeled as Gothic style are becoming the new platform for religious hybrid media practices and connections between religious and non-religious approaches.
Sovereign Heritage Crime

Sovereign Heritage Crime
  • Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past
  • Simon Maghakyan
  • Published online:
    24 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026
    • Element
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  • Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation - constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats - enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies to pursue 'performance legitimacy' by delivering a real or imagined 'permanent security'. Since this state crime is both enabled and exposed by traditional and emerging technologies, the study also explores their dual use for human rights and wrongs. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Heirloom Cultures and Heritage Branding

Heirloom Cultures and Heritage Branding
  • The Creamy Case of Icelandic Skyr
  • Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Jón Þór Pétursson
  • Published online:
    23 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 March 2026
  • Heritage branding and heirloom cultures are twin strategies for building brands in global markets. In this Element, the authors analyze these strategies through skyr; a traditional, sour dairy from Iceland. They explore how live microbial cultures in skyr have been 'heritagized' as heirloom cultures to build a brand advantage. Live skyr cultures, they show, illustrate symbiotic relations over millennia between microbial cultures and human cultures. The industrialization of this species interaction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they argue, ultimately converted a mutualistic relation into a parasitic one. Moreover, they demonstrate a parallel inversion of gender relations in the production and consumption of skyr as part of its industrialization and export. Ironically, these transformations undermine the industry's promotion of the cultures and heritage to which it has effectively put an end. They ask whether there is a more general lesson in this about the relationship between industrialization, capitalism, and heritage.
A Chinese Discourse of Heritage

A Chinese Discourse of Heritage
  • Song Hou
  • Published online:
    14 January 2026
    Print publication:
    12 February 2026
  • This Element presents an alternative approach to critical heritage studies by attending to forgotten or transformed cultural, historical ideas of heritage. It focuses on the Chinese term guji (古迹 ancient traces or vestiges), perceived today as the same as the modern concept of cultural heritage. After a macroanalysis of how guji is understood differently in contemporary and historical China, it comes to cultural-historical discourse analysis of guji recorded in the local gazetteers of Quzhou from the 1500s to the 1920s, revealing its way of categorization as boundary negotiation, and cultural modes of meaning-making and remembering, either with or without physical remains or a verifiable site. After a holistic view of this Chinese discourse as reflected in a particular guji, it concludes with a philosophical lens to highlight the alternative existence of heritage in the word guji and the uses of heritage as the uses of language.
Why Historic Places Matter Emotionally

Why Historic Places Matter Emotionally
  • Responses - Attachments - Communities
  • Rebecca Madgin
  • Published online:
    22 October 2025
    Print publication:
    13 November 2025
    • Element
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  • This Element explores why historic urban places matter emotionally. To achieve this the Element develops a conceptual framework which breaks down the broad category of 'emotion' into three interrelated parts: 1. Emotional responses, 2. Emotional attachments, and 3. Emotional communities. In so doing new lines of enquiry are opened up including the reasons why certain emotional responses such as pride and fear are provoked by historic urban places; the complex interplay of the physical environment and everyday experiences in informing emotional attachments, as well as the reasons why emotional communities coalesce in particular historic urban places. In addition, the Element explores the ways in which emotion, in the form of responses, attachments, and communities, can be considered within heritage management and concludes with a discussion of where next for heritage theories and practices. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
AI and Image

AI and Image
  • Critical Perspectives on the Application of Technology on Art and Cultural Heritage
  • Anna Foka, Jan von Bonsdorff
  • Published online:
    10 September 2025
    Print publication:
    09 October 2025
    • Element
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  • AI and Image illustrates the importance of critical perspectives in the study of AI and its application to image collections in the art and heritage sector. The authors' approach is that such entanglements of image and AI are neither dystopian or utopian but may amplify, reduce or condense existing societal inequalities depending on how they may be implemented in relation to human expertise and sensibility in terms of diversity and inclusion. The Element further discusses regulations around the use of AI for such cultural datasets as they touch upon legalities, regulations and ethics. In the conclusion they emphasise the importance of the professional expert factor in the entanglements of AI and images and advocate for a continuous and renegotiating professional symbiosis between human and machines. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In Search of National Ancestors

In Search of National Ancestors
  • Heritage, Identity and Placemaking in China
  • Shu-Li Wang
  • Published online:
    08 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • This Element examines how international heritage discourses are internalized and reshaped in China, using the Yellow Emperor cults as a lens to explore broader themes of intangible heritage, religious resurgence, and identity construction. The central argument is that cultural heritage serves as a powerful tool for shaping new religious expressions and enabling Chinese localities to assert their uniqueness while redefining historical narratives. Through case studies of several localities across China, this research illustrates how these regions engage in heritage competition by branding themselves with Yellow Emperor culture to shape their identities. This study argues that the cult of the Yellow Emperor-a legendary figure-is empowered by nationalism, a local search for tradition and religious revivals, and is further amplified by international discourses that reinforce national identity through heritage-making. Together, these forces drive the resurgence of ancestral cults and contribute to cultural identity formation in contemporary China.
Will Heritage Save Us?

Will Heritage Save Us?
  • Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Sustainable Development Turn
  • Chiara Bortolotto
  • Published online:
    24 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with the social world of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, this Element explores the mainstreaming of sustainable development principles in the heritage field. It illustrates how, while deeply entwined in the UN standardizing framework, sustainability narratives are expanding the frontiers of heritage and unsettling conventional understandings of its social and political functions. Ethnographic description of UNESCO administrative practices and case studies explain how the sustainabilization of intangible cultural heritage entails a fundamental shift in perspective: heritage is no longer nostalgically regarded as a fragile relic in need of preservation but as a resource for the future with new purposes and the potential to address broader concerns and anxieties of our times, ranging from water shortages to mental health. This might ultimately mean that the safeguarding endeavor is no longer about us protecting heritage but about heritage protecting us.
The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa

The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa
  • Rachel King
  • Published online:
    11 January 2025
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • The landscape of heritage on the African continent is the product of neoliberal economic and social interventions from the 1980s–2000s: the prevalence and influence of heritage NGOs; aid for cultural programmes contingent on government reforms; the use of national heritage policies and projects to signal ready capital; experiments in custodianship and private enterprise that balance conservation with consumerism; and so on. This Element synthesises literature from anthropology, archaeology, history, and geography to describe a significant period of heritage policy and discourse on the African continent – its historical situation, on-the-ground realities, and continuing legacies in the era of sustainable development and climate crises.
Heritage and Transformation of an African Popular Music

Heritage and Transformation of an African Popular Music
  • Aghi Bahi
  • Published online:
    26 November 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • Modern popular music is closely linked to the 'traditional' heritage – intangible and material – of which artist-musicians have, in a way, usufruct. This Element examines the relationship between (cultural) heritage and the transformation of popular music in Côte d'Ivoire. It views heritage from a dynamic and innovative perspective as a constantly evolving reality, informed by a multitude of encounters, both local and global. It frees itself from the sectoralization and disciplinary impermeability of the sector – in places of music performance to understand how the artistic-musical heritage is transmitted, imagined and managed and the complex process of transformation of popular music in which it registers. It appears that heritage, far from being frozen in time, is rather activated, deactivated and reactivated according to the creative imagination. In addition, the work highlights a minor aspect of the heritage subsumed in popular intellectuality at work in popular music.
Here and Now at Historic Sites

Here and Now at Historic Sites
  • Pupils and Guides Experiencing Heritage
  • David Ludvigsson, Martin Stolare, Cecilia Trenter
  • Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
    • Element
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  • The study explores the meaning-making of cultural heritage in school field trips to five sites in the region Östergötland in Sweden. It treats the materiality of the place and experiences of the guides and the pupils, obtained in school as well as in other contexts, as meaning-making resources during the site visits. It emphasises that sites should be seen as processes, open to interpretations and reinterpretations. The visitor is steered by expectations and common values as well as by the ways in which the heritage site is displayed and presented. In the present study, both adults (guides) and children (pupils) are defined as visitors. The authors draw on theories from history education research and from heritage studies when interpreting how pupils encounter heritage sites, they underline the centrality of 'the flesh and embodied agency' in the experience of sites. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Geopolitics of Digital Heritage

Geopolitics of Digital Heritage
  • Natalia Grincheva, Elizabeth Stainforth
  • Published online:
    18 January 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • Geopolitics of Digital Heritage analyzes and discusses the political implications of the largest digital heritage aggregators across different scales of governance, from the city-state governed Singapore Memory Project, to a national aggregator like Australia's Trove, to supranational digital heritage platforms, such as Europeana, to the global heritage aggregator, Google Arts & Culture. These four dedicated case studies provide focused, exploratory sites for critical investigation of digital heritage aggregators from the perspective of their geopolitical motivations and interests, the economic and cultural agendas of involved stakeholders, as well as their foreign policy strategies and objectives. The Element employs an interdisciplinary approach and combines critical heritage studies with the study of digital politics and communications. Drawing from empirical case study analysis, it investigates how political imperatives manifest in the development of digital heritage platforms to serve different actors in a highly saturated global information space, ranging from national governments to transnational corporations.
Heritage, Education and Social Justice

Heritage, Education and Social Justice
  • Veysel Apaydin
  • Published online:
    01 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • This research examines how museums and heritage sites can embrace a social justice approach to tackle inequalities and how they can empower disadvantaged groups to take an equal benefit from cultural resources. This Element argues that heritage institutions can use their collections of material culture more effectively to respond to social issues, and examines how they can promote equal access to resources for all people, regardless of their backgrounds. This research examines heritage and museum practices, ranging from critical and democratic approaches to authoritarian practices to expose the pitfalls and potentials therein. By analysing case studies, examining institutions' current efforts and suggesting opportunities for further development with regard to social justice, this Element argues that heritage sites and museums have great potential to tackle social issues and to create a platform for the equal redistribution of cultural resources, the recognition of diversities and the representation of diverse voices.
Heritage and Design

Heritage and Design
  • Ten Portraits from Goa (India)
  • Pamila Gupta
  • Published online:
    12 August 2022
    Print publication:
    01 September 2022
  • This Element looks at the relationship between heritage and design by way of a case study approach. It offers up ten distinct portraits of a range of heritage makers located in Goa, a place that has been predicated on its difference, both historical and cultural, from the rest of India. A former Portuguese colonial enclave (1510–1961) surrounded by what was formerly British India (1776–1947), the author attempts to read Goa's heritage as a form of place-ness, a source of inspiration for further design work that taps into the Goa of the twenty-first century. The series of portraits are visual, literary, and sensorial, and take the reader on a heritage tour through a design landscape of villages, markets, photography festivals, tailors and clothing, books, architecture, painting, and decorative museums. They do so in order to explore heritage futures as increasingly dependent on innovation, design, and the role of the individual.
Heritage Making and Migrant Subjects in the Deindustrialising Region of the Latrobe Valley

Heritage Making and Migrant Subjects in the Deindustrialising Region of the Latrobe Valley
  • Alexandra Dellios
  • Published online:
    07 March 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022
  • This Element argues that community-initiated migrant heritage harbours the potential to challenge and expand state-sanctioned renderings of multiculturalism in liberal nation-states. In this search for alternative readings, community-initiated migrant heritage is positioned as a grassroots challenge to positivist state-multiculturalism. It can do this if we adopt the migrant perspective, a diasporic perspective of 'settlement' that is always unfinished, non-static, and non-essentialist. As mobile subjects, either once or many times over - a subject position arrived at through acts of mobility, sometimes spawned by violence or structural inequality, which can reverberate throughout subsequent generations - the migrant subject position compels us to look both forwards and backwards in time and place.
Global Heritage, Religion, and Secularism

Global Heritage, Religion, and Secularism
  • Trinidad Rico
  • Published online:
    03 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • Religion and spirituality have been scarcely addressed in heritage preservation history, discourse, and practice. More recently, increased interest in the intersections between the study of religion and heritage preservation in both academic studies and institutional initiatives highlight obstacles that the field has yet to overcome theoretically and methodologically. This Element surveys the convergences of religious and heritage traditions. It argues that the critical heritage turn has not adequately considered the legacy of secularism that underpins the history and contemporary practices of heritage preservation. This omission is what has left the field of heritage studies ill-equipped to support the study and management of a heritage of religion broadly construed.
Ethnographic Returns

Ethnographic Returns
  • Memory Processes and Archive Film
  • Anne Gustavsson
  • Published online:
    26 August 2021
    Print publication:
    16 September 2021
  • In the past decades cultural heritage stored at museums and archives has been returned to source communities in various forms and under diverse circumstances. This contribution to the Elements series explores and discusses specifically the return of digital 'ethnographic' images to indigenous and non indigenous people that share a common recent history of coexistence and dispute over the same territory that is to be understood in the light of the consolidation of a Nation State with a settler colonial logic. The author argues that the affective reception of what a given archive labels as tangible and intangible heritage varies according to each audience´s particular memory practices, historical experience and way of relating to shared hegemonic notions of 'whiteness' and 'indigeneity'.
Understanding Islam at European Museums

Understanding Islam at European Museums
  • Magnus Berg, Klas Grinell
  • Published online:
    12 July 2021
    Print publication:
    05 August 2021
  • Exhibitions of Islamic artefacts in European museums have since 1989 been surrounded by a growing rhetoric of cultural tolerance, in response to the dissemination of images of Islam as misogynist, homophobic and violent. This has produced a new public context for exhibitions of Islam and has led to major recent investments in new galleries for Islamic artefacts, often with financial support from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. This Element addresses contemporary framings of Islam in European museums, focusing on how museums in Germany and the UK with collections of Islamic heritage realise the ICOM (International Council of Museums) definition of museums as institutions in the service of society. The authors find that far too often the knowledge of Islamic cultural heritage is disconnected from contemporary developments in museum transformations, as well as from the geopolitical contexts they are a response to.
Native Americans in British Museums

Native Americans in British Museums
  • Living Histories
  • Jack Davy
  • Published online:
    28 June 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021
  • The accumulated collections of Native American material culture in museums in Britain are vast, and of critical cultural importance. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous American visitors to UK museum displays and collections between 2017 and 2019, this Element highlights the most significant inadequacies of contemporary engagement with Native American visitors and communities, identifying fundamental problems rooted in the ethos of collection management and display. It then explores why two critical crises, one of representation and one of expertise, are together exacerbating these problems, and the damage to relationships and reputation which can result when these crises collide with Indigenous demands for greater agency in museum processes. The final section applies these lessons directly, developing an adaptable policy document, to assist museum staff in effectively and respectfully managing their relationships with Indigenous communities and collections.
Construing Cultural Heritage: The Stagings of an Artist

Construing Cultural Heritage: The Stagings of an Artist
  • The Case of Ivar Arosenius
  • Mats Malm
  • Published online:
    17 May 2021
    Print publication:
    10 June 2021
  • This study examines how an artist construed himself as cultural heritage by the turn of the 19th century, how this heritage was further construed after his death, and how the artworks can be made to further new approaches and insights through a digital archive (aroseniusarchive.se). The study employs the concept of 'staging' to capture the means used by the artist, as well as by reception, in this construal. The question of 'staging' involves not only how the artist has been called forth from the archives, but also how the artist can be called forth in new ways today through digitization. The study first elaborates on the theoretical framework through the aspects of mediation and agency, then explores how the artist was staged after his death. Finally, the artist's own means of staging himself are explored. Swedish painter Ivar Arosenius (1878–1909) is the case studied.

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