Annual conferences / workshops

Bodies in, as, of, with, and ‘Identity and Heritage’ (8th Annual Conference)

Over the last thirty years, academic interest in conceptualising bodies has significantly risen. The focus has shifted from bodies as passive objects to subjects, instruments, arenas and sources of knowledge production, especially in studying identity and heritage constructions. Boosted by socialist-feminist scholars, bodies have found their way into various disciplines, including art and cultural studies, urban geography and architectural theory.Bodies are thereby to be understood as socially constructed and politically charged concepts embedded in social power relations of knowledge production. Processes of attributing meaning to heritage and identity can also be re-examined through the lens of the human, non-human, built, digital, and imagined bodies.The field of tension between the conceptualisation of bodies becomes apparent in the example of heritage conservation when, on the one hand, visitors to cultural heritage sites are primarily seen as a threat to the preservation of […]