Ghosts of the Anthropocene : spectral accretions at the Port Arthur historic site

As a place of heritage, the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, Australia, provides a substantial representation of a colonial landscape. Principally associated with Australia’s convict history, the vestiges that are found there today take the form of extant buildings, shorelines, cemeteries, exercise yards and cells. Port Arthur is also thought to harbour less-tangible residues of its pasts in the form of ghostly apparitions and atmospheres. Indeed, it is often referred to as being one of the most haunted places in Australia. However, rather than focus on the supernatural traces of some of the deviant criminals once imprisoned there, this article will take a broader account of ‘ghosts’ to consider the interrelations between human and nonhumans in the Anthropocene. To do so, we look to the abiding, ‘haunting’ presence of ‘arboreal-others’ in order to re-enliven our understanding of Port Arthur’s pasts and reimagine their role in its present and future

Exploring the relationships between heritage tourism, sustainable community development and host communities' health and wellbeing : a systematic review

Previous studies examining the impact of heritage tourism have focused on specific ecological, economic, political, or cultural impacts. Research focused on the extent to which heritage tourism fosters host communities' participation and enhances their capacity to flourish and support long-term health and wellbeing is lacking. This systematic review assessed the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development, as well as the health and wellbeing of local communities. Studies were included if they: (i) were conducted in English; (ii) were published between January 2000 and March 2021; (iii) used qualitative and/or quantitative methods; (iv) analysed the impact of heritage tourism on sustainable community development and/or the health and wellbeing of local host communities; and (v) had a full-text copy available. The search identified 5292 articles, of which 102 articles met the inclusion criteria. The included studies covering six WHO regions (Western Pacific, African, Americas, South-East Asia, European, Eastern Mediterranean, and multiple regions). These studies show that heritage tourism had positive and negative impacts on social determinants of health. Positive impacts included economic gains, rejuvenation of culture, infrastructure development, and improved social services. However, heritage tourism also had deleterious effects on health, such as restrictions placed on local community participation and access to land, loss of livelihood, relocation and/or fragmentation of communities, increased outmigration, increases in crime, and erosion of culture. Thus, while heritage tourism may be a poverty-reducing strategy, its success depends on the inclusion of host communities in heritage tourism governance, decision-making processes, and access to resources and programs. Future policymakers are encouraged to adopt a holistic view of benefits along with detriments to sustainable heritage tourism development. Additional research should consider the health and wellbeing of local community groups engaged in heritage tourism. Protocol PROSPERO registration number: CRD42018114681

Memorialization and Affect: Remembering Pearl Harbor: Final Report

Remembering Pearl Harbor is a research project that focused on developing an understanding of both representational practices and the subjective, inter-subjective and reflexive performances of heritage tourists in situ, using three Pearl Harbor Historic Sites in Honolulu, Hawaii, as case studies

A more-than-representational understanding of heritage? : the 'past' and the politics of affect

This review examines debates situated at the intersection between heritage studies and geography, particularly those that revolve around more-than-representational theories. These theories, the review suggests, advance recent developments within the heritage field concerned with those senses of ‘the now’ so often left neglected by conventional understandings of heritage. The intellectual traditions underpinning this contribution draw primarily from the field of cultural geography, especially those that touch upon the tactile, experiential, aural, emotional and sonic. What this lends to the field of heritage studies is a vigorous and distinct way of conceptualising heritage in terms of the body, practice and performativity, together with an insistence that our engagements with it occur through a range of embodied dispositions and interactions. In other words, it insists that we, as heritage researchers, become more attentive to different possibilities for knowing and doing heritage: the ways in which it makes sense or answers back to a fuller range of people (after Thrift 2008)

Heritage tourism and its representations

In the past I have explored the role of discourse with reference to heritage policy in the British context of New Labour government, concluding that a particular 'way of seeing' heritage plays a dominant and complex role in reproducing social relations of inequality (see Waterton 2010a). Significantly, this discourse has continued to dominate despite the new Conservative government's political strivings for community cohesion. And so it remains to this discourse that I turn in this chapter, pinpointing the role it plays within British cultural industries and, specifically, within heritage tourism. Why? Because ideas of heritage in Britain seem to operate in much the same way as Nietzsche's 'culture', only in this scenario it is the lie of heritage 'that poses as if it were the only reality' (cited in Webb 2009: 117). To make this case, the chapter closes in on a specific outcome of these mediated processes: the paint at which a handful of iconic images, awash with intimations of power, wealth, magnificence, spirituality and longevity, are equated with the complex material and social realities of 'being British'. Here, the rehearsed and repeated cultural symbols of a particular social group- the elite, middle-classes and the predominantly white -are peddled to international and domestic tourists alike, where their reiteration allows them to become 'obvious', 'true' or, at the very least, 'common sense'. While all manner of interesting things can be said about the messages such images convey to international tourists, my focus in this chapter lies with the domestic, because this same set of limited touristic symbols is also presented as 'the true test' of belonging (Hall l999: 24). Thus, through a process as adept at obscuring the past as it is at marketing it, Britain's multicultural citizenry are asked to positively respond to an exclusive set of representations somehow deemed capable of identifying the nation

A coda for the 'left behind' : heritage and more-than-representational theories

It is 3 March 2010, a Wednesday evening, exactly twenty-five years since the year-long miners’ strike of 1984–85 in the United Kingdom officially ended. I am sitting in the Forum Theatre in the Cultural Quarter of Stoke-onTrent, Staff ordshire, as an audience member for a twenty-fifth anniversary event that has adopted a format similar to the BBC’s live debate series Question Time. Much like Question Time, the evening’s event is guided by a Chair, Oliver Speight, and revolves around the perspectives put forward by a panel of five public figures: Edwina Currie, a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for South Derbyshire from 1983 to 1997; George Galloway, an MP for four constituencies between 1987 and 2015; Ken Loach, an English fi lmmaker who directed Which Side Are You On?1 in 1985; David Hencke, an investigative journalist and author of Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners’ Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain; and Mike Nattrass, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the West Midlands from 2004 to 2014 and Deputy Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2002 to 2006. I am in the audience because I am fairly new to the region and I want to better understand the impacts of deindustrialization, as well as its enduring legacies, some of which I have come to recognize through my engagement with the city’s distinctive heritage, which has created a landscape dotted with derelict bottle ovens that continue to haunt with their visual intimations of the past

Public education and archaeology : disciplining through education

In 1994 Brian Molyneaux suggested that one of the most obvious, yet critical, functions of archaeology for society was education (Molyneaux 1994: 3; see also Stone 2004; Willcock 2004 ). Since then, the pairing of archaeology with education has gained considerable ground; so much so that while the term "public education" may not necessarily come to mind for all scholars and practitioners working within the field, most will hold an implicit familiarity with its central tenets via their connections to outreach, community archaeology, social inclusion, or public participation. This is because all of these concepts - and the practices they reflect - emerged out of a broader social movement that prompted archaeologists to start thinking about, reflecting upon, and dealing with the complex relationships between "the discipline" and "the public." As with other attempts to engender public participation and support, education operates as a powerful point of connection between scholars, practitioners, politicians, and a vast variety of stakeholders and interest groups. A useful consequence of this arrangement has been the burgeoning of a range of learning tools, public presentations, "archaeology weeks," festivals, and volunteering opportunities. Yet, despite the proactive hmguage often used to describe this area of development, it is important to remember that it can play out in a number of ways, not all of which are positive

More-than-representational landscapes

Landscape research has seen a burgeoning of interest in notions of 'affect', 'doing', 'performance' and 'practice' in the past decade or so. Although these notions can be parceled together in a variety of ways, in this chapter I want to situate them within the range of work dealing with what has come to be termed more-than-representational theories (Lorimer 2005). As a style of thinking, more-than-representational theories emerged in the mid-1990s in response to the 'mesmerized attention' given to texts and images, which, as Nigel Thrift (2000: 380) argued, had occluded 'a lot of the little things'. Originally termed 'non-representational theory' (and still referred to as such by a number of scholars) or 'the theory of practices', more-than-representational thinking is today associated primarily with the fields of cultural and political geography, and the work of Ben Anderson, John-David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Hayden Lorimer, Derek McComack and John Wylie, all of whom, like Thrift, are geographers based in UK universities. Many have connections to the University of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences (Cresswell 2012), where non-representational theory first emerged. Although it is an approach with a particularly strong UK adherence,it has been applied in geographical contexts that range from Britain to Denmark, Canada, Hong Kong, Argentina, Hungary, the United States and Australia, to name a few

Landscape and non-representational theories

Landscape research has recently seen a burgeoning of interest around notions of 'affect', 'emotion', 'embodiment', 'performance' and 'practice'. Although these notions can be parceled together in a variety of ways, in this chapter I want to situate them within the still developing range of work dealing with what has come to be termed non-representational theory. As a style of thinking, non-representational theory emerged in the mid-1990s. Though originally coined by Nigel Thrift, it is today associated with Ben Anderson, John-David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison, Hayden Lorimer, Derek McComack, Mitch Rose and John Wylie, all of whom, like Thrift, are geographers based in the UK. The term 'theory' is perhaps a little disingenuous here as it implies something in the singular; non-representational theories may be more useful a term (see Anderson 2009), as it denotes something of a catchall rather than a strict or prescriptive theoretical framework. With this in mind, Hayden Lorimer (2005: 83) has proposed the phrase 'more-than-representational', which seems to adequately sum up attempts ' ... to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds'

The burden of knowing versus the privilege of unknowing

The British bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade provides a potent example through which to explore the 'burden of knowing' that underpins many acts of national self-reflection. As well as exploring some of the intricacies of remembering illustrated by this example, this chapter also tackles the bicentenary with a view to working this particular example into a wider consideration of British identity. In so doing, the chapter argues that complex strategies of remembering/forgetting have, in this context at least, allowed national policymakers to use the past as an anchor or area of retreat in which to regroup and bolster a particular image of Britishness-an image that has recently been placed under threat by contemporary calls for multiculturalism and cultural parity. This is because it is an image that prioritizes a monological, essentializing, homogenous and inherently white British identity, and thereby fails to bring multiethnic communities fully into historicity as competent and equal members of British society (see Gilroy 1987; Hall 1996). As such, the bicentenary, while carrying an opportunity to critically examine a history of exploitation, became instead a moment through which to contribute to the continuing neglect of the difficulties and anxieties faced by marginalized groups as they struggle against racialized politics of identity {Waterton 2010a). To explore these issues, the chapter draws on the theoretical and methodological tools offered by Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is applied to a range of official publications produced both prior to and during the abolition year of 2007