Socialising heritage/socialising legacy

A key value offered by collaborative research is to recognise the powerful role relationships play in the development and legacy of knowledge. The project ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ put the social dynamics between the collaborative team – comprised of researchers, practitioners, funders and community activists – at the heart of the project’s methodology. Thinking of our research as social and relational also reflected our interest in thinking about heritage socially and relationally. Taking this approach was helpful because the concept of heritage is often bound up with big and abstract aims, to be ‘forever and for everyone’. These very scaled-up ambitions often politically lead towards the professional management of heritage ‘on behalf of’ a larger public. We show that for participation in heritage decision-making to be increased these larger ideas – ‘stewardship’, ‘scale’, ‘significance’ and ‘the future’ – need themselves to be socialised and, through this, made more amenable to participation. We have also used the same methodologies we diagnosed for increasing participation in heritage for our own, equally relational, approach to legacy: to act, connect, reflect and situate.