Nuclear Cultural Heritage takes you on a global journey, exploring heritage-making in diverse contexts. The book includes nuclear weapon deployment sites in New Mexico and the Kiritimati Islands, irradiated landscapes of the Eastern Urals in Russia and Fukushima in Japan, humble radioactive sediments in South Sweden, and seemingly safe museum confinements such as the Musée Curie in Paris. The diversity of the legacies of nuclear technology is revealed in exemplary case studies of, among others, utopian ruins in Argentina, military base remnants in Cuba and ‘peaceful’ nuclear reactors undergoing decommissioning in Ukraine. The book argues that nuclear cultural heritage-making enables communities, organisations and societies to reckon with complex problems such as national security, environmental degradation and colonial dispossession. It shows that nuclear cultural heritage-making can open pathways for bringing diverse stakeholders together to shape more democratic and viable living milieus in the extremely long-term nuclear age.

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To illustrate how teaching methods can be applied across subject and cultural contexts, key concepts such as experiential learning and socially informed pedagogies are brought to life in case studies written by expert professionals from a range of disciplines, including archaeology, contemporary art and textiles. The cases aim to demystify common teaching approaches and motivate practitioners to enhance their teaching practices, with critical evaluation of theoretical foundations that shape teaching methodologies helping to lead the way towards effective pedagogy. Set within consideration of impacts from wider society and the perspectives of community, inclusion, sustainability and science influence practice, the book is a secure starting point for new teachers in heritage conservation that offers insight and variety for more established educators.

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With over 2,000 examples, the V&A has one of the largest collections of this kind, originally assembled to form a visual sourcebook for contemporary artists and craftspeople. Using this collection as a guiding thread, Fragmented Illuminations seeks to contextualise cuttings and chart their changing meanings and functions from the time of their making to their unexpected afterlives in the hands of private collectors, dealers, and Europe’s museums of applied arts. To complete the picture, new interdisciplinary research sheds light on the manuscripts they came from, as well as the artists and patrons involved in their making. The book demonstrates how these complex objects can only be understood by mobilising knowledge from many disciplines, including art history, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, palaeography, conservation science,and provenance research.

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For nearly half a century, heritage organisations have created digital inventories of their collections. Inspired by the prospect of combining these records so they may be explored together, the Congruence Engine research project set out to build digital bridges and pathways between collections dedicated to the UK’s industrial history for textiles, energy, and communications. Launched in 2021, Congruence Engine navigated the generative AI revolution that commenced a year later. As a result, Emergent Histories is by turns a reflection on the historical and curatorial possibilities arising from collections, a digital history how-to manual, and a narrative of the tribulations of AI early adopters. It will be of interest to historians, curators, students – and to anyone who cares for the industrial aspects of our past.

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Each chapter considers how to support communities, particularly those that are marginalised, by linking heritage to broader social justice struggles, addressing structural inequalities, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and fostering inclusive education and curatorial practices. Contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – including anthropology, archaeology, architecture, conservation, education, science communication, and urban planning – offer rich, cross-sectoral perspectives. Through this collaborative and critically engaged approach, the volume articulates new conceptual and methodological directions for advancing social justice through heritage work, responding to the urgent demands of a fragmented and rapidly evolving world.

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The book is framed around the concept of ‘unearthing’, the process of revealing hidden truths, excavating layers of history, and uncovering the unknown. It explores how the pursuit of knowledge often comes at the cost of displacement, exploitation, commodification, and the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism.

Alongside critique of the extractive practices that shaped many collections and archives, the book proposes a shift towards ‘re-earthing’, a practice that reconfigures how we understand and engage with knowledge about traces. As a critical approach, re-earthing acknowledges the messy, entangled nature of traces of the past, rejecting attempts to purify or control them in collections and archives, so they may evolve into new forms of knowledge. This innovative perspective challenges scholars, archivists, artists, and collection practitioners to rethink their approach to time and trace, urging them to disrupt dominant chronologies and cultivate new ethical approaches for working with collections and archives.

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Ancient Identities in Britain investigates how ideas about the Iron Age and Roman past remain socially relevant: how they are studied in UK classrooms and presented in the media, and how they are projected by ancient monuments, open-air museums, re-enactments, living history exhibits and community projects across England, Scotland and Wales. Adding to this survey, fieldwork and interviews at five heritage venues, including Vindolanda, Castell Henllys and Butser Ancient Farm, reveal the principles and motivations of professional staff and different styles of presentation for the public. An engaging and nuanced account of everyday practices, this study sheds new light on the processes through which heritage has been made. Throughout, Ancient Identities in Britain explores the actions, ideas and material conditions through which these periods become, and have become, heritage in the present, and investigates how contemporary social practices are transformed through encounters with material traces and conceptual legacies.

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The book’s scope is global. It draws on examples from wealthy countries in the Global North and from low- to middle-income countries that often depend on heritage resources to fuel tourist economies. Essential Economics for Heritage is an invaluable resource for heritage practitioners and can serve as a textbook or auxiliary text for courses in archaeology, heritage site or museum management, conservation and other heritage fields.

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Deconstituting Museums argues that the difficulties produced by adding participatory practice arise from political incompatibility. In the representational liberal logics that underpin museum decision-making, trustees and professionals make decisions ‘on behalf of’ future generations and the public. This is a political infrastructure the book names ‘museum constitution’. Conversely, participation arises from ideas and practices from direct and horizontal political traditions, drawing those who act as facilitators into new relationships and expanding political imaginations.

Through sustained engagement with theories of affect, materialism, and feminist and decolonial praxis, Helen Graham identifies techniques for deconstituting museums. She uses experimental writing as a method to turn away from the desire to right institutional wrongs and towards relational and directly negotiated ways of organising. In doing so she locates participation not as engagement but as a mode of governance that is enabled by, and enables, variant political ontologies. This is an alternative named ‘participatory worlding’. The affective work of facilitating participation has long tugged at and frayed museums’ constitutional liberal logics. Deconstituting Museums envisages how participation and its affects might be activated in reworking the politics of heritage.

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