Decolonising European minds through Heritage

Tackling Eurocentric Perspectives on Cultural World Heritage: Suggestions for Including Postcolonial Approaches in World Heritage Education

“…Secondly, it will present selected perspectives of secondary school students on specific aspects of cultural WH. These results reveal Eurocentric thinking patterns, hence, underlining the necessity for decolonising heritage [14]. To conclude, the authors provide suggestions to foster the adoption of critical and reflexive thinking in WHE.…”

The securitisation of cultural heritage

“…Accordingly, the experiences of East European cultural policy can offer lessons, both negative and positive ones, which are worth considering and should not be dismissed as background noise, an imperfect transition to liberal democracy. In the contexts of the marginalisation of cultural policy by populist and conservative attacks against experts (Gross 2019) and the urgent need to decolonise West European public spaces, discourses and curricula by acknowledging the colonial past and the contribution of nonwhite Europeans and the global South (Gilroy 1995;Turunen 2020), there is a need for a new social contract between cultural professionals and society. The highly complex problems of the return of ethnic nationalism and the rise of the far right and populism do not separate but unite the 'old ' and 'new' European democracies.…”

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union

“…One of the core aims of our book is to examine 'the European' in heritage and how it is constructed and narrated through the EHL and in its implementation below the EU level. Our closer analysis of how European significance is framed in the European panel's selection reports has been already published elsewhere Turunen 2019b).…”

“…When faced with a lack of acknowledgement on the EU level, engagement in the debate becomes a one-sided plea for inclusion. There are, however, some important openings in starting the debate on the (post)coloniality of heritage in the EU context (see Settele 2015;Buettner 2018) to which the EUROHERIT has also actively contributed (Turunen 2019a(Turunen , 2019b.…”

“…Although many museums across Europe are re-evaluating colonial histories (e.g. Thomas 2009;Dixon 2012;Kros 2014;Buettner 2018;van Huis 2019;Turunen, 2019b), for the time being both colonialism and the many mobilities it entailed are poorly represented in the EU-AHD. This contributes to the exclusion of both Muslim and post-migrant communities from the EUropean heritage community currently under construction.…”