Curation Archives

Critical Heritage and Social Justice

Critical Heritage and Social Justice brings together insights and experiences of scholars and practitioners working across heritage, museums, galleries, and cultural institutions to explore how principles of social justice can be embedded within these spaces. Bridging theoretical frameworks with practical applications, it presents a range of case studies and critical reflections that illuminate pathways toward transformative, justice-oriented heritage practices. Using Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional justice framework of redistribution, recognition, and representation, the book situates social justice at the heart of critical heritage studies, highlighting its intersections with urgent global challenges including the climate crisis, conflict, forced migration, and widening social, cultural and economic inequalities. All these issues demand inclusive, equitable and community-engaged approaches within the heritage sector.

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.

Picturing the Invisible

Picturing the Invisible presents different disciplinary approaches to articulating the invisible, that which is not known or that which is not provable. The challenge that we have seen is how to articulate these concepts, not only to those within a particular academic field but beyond, to other disciplines and society at large. As our understanding of the complexity of the world grows incrementally, so does our realisation that issues and problems can rarely be resolved within neat demarcations. Therefore, the importance of finding means of communicating across disciplines and fields becomes a priority. Whilst acknowledging the essential importance of the specialist academic, the capacity to understand other disciplines, their priorities, methodologies and even the language used can become crucial in being an effective instrument for change.
This book brings together insights from leading academics from a wide range of disciplines including Art and Design, Curatorial Practice, Literature, Forensic Science, Fashion, Medical Science, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Philosophy, Astrophysics and Architecture with a shared interest in exploring how, in each discipline, we strive to find expression for the invisible or unknown, and to draw out and articulate some of the explicit and tacit ways of communicating those concepts that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Beyond the Visual

Beyond the Visual broadens the discussion of multisensory ways of beholding contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on modes that transcend a dependency upon sight. A central premise is that a shift in the aesthetic engagement afforded by hybrid forms of contemporary art has the potential to open up new sensory and cognitive engagements for blind and partially blind people. This is a subject that has rarely been addressed within the literature on contemporary arts or disability studies.

Bringing together leading international scholars and artists in the emerging field of ‘blindness arts’, including blind and partially blind artists, curators, advocates for inclusive practices and models of audio description, cognitive psychologists, and theorists of installation, performance and sound art, the book offers a detailed consideration of exemplars of such multisensory engagement, pre-eminently in works by blind or partially blind artists. In so doing, the book not only shifts the discussion on access and inclusivity – reconceiving access as integral to the creative process – but argues that this has the potential to enrich the experience of art for all beholders, moving beyond an often-unexamined reliance on vision.