The AHRC identified a number of priority research areas for heritage in their Future Heritage Research Strategy. We addressed some of these areas through our own research themes, which provided a focus for our research and leadership activities.

Climate Change

If heritage has conventionally been understood as preservation practices which aim to slow or hold back processes of transformation and decay, how can engage creatively with issues relating to environmental change?

Data, Technology & Social Change

In what ways are big data and new technologies driving change within the heritage sector? How might heritage researchers engage them productively?

Future Heritages

What are the emergent forms of future heritages? How do particular forms of heritage practice help to assemble and design specific future worlds?

Global Challenges Research Fund

What is the relationship between heritage and sustainable development goals and how might heritage researchers more effectively engage with the new global challenges research fund agenda?

Inclusion, Exclusion & Diversity

If heritage is fundamentally concerned with collecting “diversity-at-risk”, why has it also emerged as one of the primary means by which human difference is articulated in contemporary identity politics? How does heritage work to include and exclude?

Nature, Culture, & Posthumanities

How might heritage engage with developments in the posthumanities and acknowledge more-than-human publics? What is the relationship between natural and cultural heritages?

Sustainable & Unsustainable Development

What is the role of heritage in sustainable and international development? How might an acknowledgement of the limits of preserving, conserving and collecting allow us to reimagine the role of heritage in society?

The UK in Europe

How is heritage implicated in issues such as Brexit, the European Migrant Crisis, the rise of neo-nationalisms and post-truth?