Session organiser: Holger Nehring
Division of History, Heritage and Politics and Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy, University of Stirling, UK
Session description:
The papers in this closed session bring together analytical perspectives from a number of disciplines on some key questions pertaining to the natural and cultural heritage of landscapes. The proposed interdisciplinary session explores the ways in which geopolitics have turned cold memories into hot political issues with regard to border landscapes in northern Europe. We are interested in the ways in which heritage is presented nationally and transnationally and made and unmade in the context of changing geopolitical environments: how are border landscapes used to create material and natural manifestations of geopolitical conflicts?
Through case studies on real and imaginary landscapes, our papers zoom in on the ways in which Cold War heritage has been materialised by references to border landscapes in the context of changing geopolitics. Our case studies of real and imagined landscapes cover bunkers and a border town as well as the way in which geopolitical crises have shifted the borders and boundaries of political and socio-cultural discourses over landscapes.
In particular we ask: how does geopolitics influence the ways in which border landscapes are nationalised and de-nationalised in the making of heritage? How and when do landscapes becomes spaces on which social and cultural memories of past conflicts is projected in the making of heritage? What role do landscapes – and their seeming naturalness – play in making and unmaking authenticity?
Our session thus contributes to three themes for this conference: society, culture and identity in border landscapes, natural and cultural heritage in border landscapes as well as methodological approaches to border landscapes studies. We bring together environmental historians, heritage scholars, anthropologists, architectural and art historians as well as international relations scholars to develop novel ways for thinking about the heritage of border landscapes in the context of geopolitics.
Our case studies come from northern Europe where we find processes of the cold and hot heritagisation of landscapes to be especially pronounced. Our four papers span a range of thematical and chronological themes that explore different aspects of this broader theme.
