How can participation in heritage decision making be increased from wherever you are?
A collaborative research team shares its findings
Heritage is about what we value: places, buildings, objects, memories, cultures, skills or ways of life. So why can it be so hard to get actively involved in heritage decision-making?
Drawing on innovative practice and research experiments, a team of twenty people – researchers, policy makers, funders, museum practitioners, people who are activists about their own history and heritage – have worked together to design and then carry out a research project focused on participation in heritage decision making.
Heritage Decisions (also known as ‘How should decisions about heritage be made?’) was a two-year innovative pilot scheme developed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme. The Connected Communities ‘Co-design and Co-creation Development Awards’ scheme sought not only to enable collaborative research between researchers, policy makers, practitioners and community groups but to actively enable the collaborative development of a research agenda, from its earliest stages.
As the project comes to its conclusion, the Heritage Decisions team has developed a website, publications and a series of events to show what you can do to increase participation in museums and heritage. Whether you are a leader and shaper of policy and organizations, you’re trying to do good work within structures you don’t control or whether you simply care about the culture and history of the place in which you live, these project outcomes will surely resonate.
Principal Investigator, Dr Helen Graham at the University of Leeds, said of the project:
‘While all had a shared interest in heritage and decision-making, the team was formed deliberately to draw into dialogue people from different backgrounds, positions and approaches. The aim was to use the team’s collective experiences, perspectives and positions to create a research project which might explore how to increase participation in heritage decision-making.’
The project’s research insights were derived from two key approaches. The first came about by reflecting on innovative work already undertaken by practitioners in the research team, the second through conducting research experiments. The project’s final booklet focused on how participation in heritage decision-making can be increased from wherever you work or live and whatever your position – professional, researcher or someone who cares about your own culture and place.
In terms of reflecting on innovative practice, John Lawson, Kathy Cremin and Mike Benson, who collaborated first at Ryedale Folk Museum and now at Bede’s World, reflected on the development of their approaches to distributed decisions making through turning museums inside out, conceptualising heritage as a ‘living stream’ that sustain the places it flows through and decision-making as distributed so that all staff and volunteers might have ‘freedom of self’.
In terms of a research experiment, at the Science Museum the focus was on how communities can contribute towards developing museum collections. The project, coordinated by Tim Boon, Head of Research and Public History, focused on electronic music and work with musicians, fans and self-confessed synth-geeks – Jean-Phillipe Calvin, John Stanley, David Robinson, Martin Swan with researcher Richard Courtney, University of Leicester – to recommend items for the Science Museum collections. Alongside these practical recommendations, the project also came to question logics of preservation by arguing that a future for the synthesizer collections might be best secured not by keeping them away from being touched but by them being played, used and celebrated by a community of those that know and care about them.
Other projects included: a chance for the Heritage Lottery Fund to see one of their projects, The Potteries Tile Trail, up close; an exploration of how a Conservation Officer collaborated with architects and developers in Leicester; a project of organizational reflective practice at the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland; an investigation of heritage decision making within the city of York.
The key ideas that have emerged from the Heritage Decisions project — all ways in which to increase participation in museums and heritage — are:
- Act: Make change from where you are
- Connect: Cross boundaries and collaborate
- Reflect: See your work through other people’s eyes
- Situate: Understand your work in context
The project celebrated the launch of the final project booklet – ‘How should heritage decisions be made?: Increasing participation from where you are’ – with four events tying into the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities Festival in June 2015. Events in Manchester and Stoke explored community-led and DIY approaches to heritage. A further event and training workshop took place in Scotland — Connected with the Clyde: A Multi-Disciplinary Canoe Journey.
To download the project’s final booklet, and for more information, see the project website:www.heritagedecisions.leeds.ac.uk
Alternatively contact the project’s Principle Investigator, Dr Helen Graham at the University of Leeds, on h.graham@leeds.ac.uk Twitter: @heritageres