Session organizers: Linde Egberts1, Marilena Mela2, Julia van Duijvenvoorde3
(1) Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, The Netherlands
(2) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
(3) Heidelberg University, Germany
Session description
Landscape and heritage research have converged over the past decades (Harvey 2015); both becoming more interdisciplinary and with an increasing interest in the heritage and landscape of the marginalized and ordinary. Yet their impact in the wider fields of environmental humanities and decolonization studies remains somewhat limited.
Indeed, heritage and landscape scholars have been working in different disciplines (archaeology, geography, landscape architecture, art history, anthropology), often remaining “comfortably nested” in the methodological traditions of their own disciplines, and rarely being explicit about the construction of their methodologies in their research outputs.
We believe heritage and landscape research could become more impactful in organizing and guiding interdisciplinary knowledge if we would make visible the boundaries we work with and move beyond, conceptually, methodologically and empirically.
In this session we focus on how ordinary, peripheral and ruined landscapes act as frontiers of knowledge. Anna Tsing (2005) describes local places as having agency in processes of globalization. She coins the term friction to refer to the ways globalization is produced as a result of direct contact between places. Frontiers and borders are transit zones were cultures or interests meet or clash, “zones of awkward engagement” between global processes and local conditions.
We welcome submissions from the broader field of landscape and heritage studies, that focus on the translation of ontological foundations, theoretical concepts and their methodological implications. These could for example include the critical evaluation of the use of new technologies or the evaluation of integrating methods from various disciplinary backgrounds.
We find that the study of border- and frontier-landscapes are particularly relevant lenses through which to explore interdisciplinarity, both being liminal spaces from which we can learn. As William Blake once said, “in the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors."
