The PITCH project has published a groundbreaking special themed collection of articles in the International Journal of Heritage Studies on Carbon heritages. All articles are published in OpenAccess format so they are free to access.
Individual papers in the themed section consider museological collections connected to extractive industries and petrocultures in Germany, South Korea and Portugal, commemorative practices surrounding the decline of coal in the UK, the emergence of new curatorial perspectives on gas extraction in the Netherlands, and the social and material impact of decarbonisation rhetoric on former industrial heritage sites and landscapes in Germany and Belgium.
To help frame these case studies, themed section editors Rodney Harrison, Gertjan Plets, and Colin Sterling have published an introductory essay to develop a new framework for research at the intersection of critical heritage studies and energy humanities. By attending to energy as a constitutive agent in heritage-making, it challenges conventional paradigms of varied heritage processes. It advances three key arguments: (1) heritage and carbon modernity are deeply intertwined; (2) conceptual frameworks such as petrocultures and carbon cultures gesture towards divergent carbon and energy relations in heritage; and (3) new approaches to heritage can help to foster a deeper engagement with the politics of decarbonisation across society. Foregrounding carbon cultures and carbon heritages as both methodologies and concepts, it advocates reorienting heritage studies to account for the material, cultural, and socio-political entanglements of carbon-intensive energy systems, which have so far been overlooked.
Contents of the Special Themed Section
- Rodney Harrison, Gertjan Plets, and Colin Sterling, Carbon heritages: histories, politics, imaginaries
- Dolly Jørgensen and Nora Thorade, Carbon cultures of progress in history of technology museums
- Rodney Harrison, Reimagining the role of coal mining heritage in the context of the fortieth anniversary of the 1984–85 UK Miners’ strike, green energy transitions and the Carbocene
- Janna oud Ammerveld, Gertjan Plets and Nikkie Wiegink, Curating gasscapes after extraction: materiality, petromodernity and politics in the case of the Groningen natural gas field
- Colin Sterling, Jeff Diamanti, Harry Reddick and Selçuk Balamir, Inheriting energy infrastructures: from deindustrialisation to decarbonisation
- Nélia Dias and Mounir Sabeh Affaki, From exhibiting minerals to narrating extraction: reflections from Lisbon’s National Museum of Science and Natural History
Leave a Reply