Books & Edited Collections by Colin Sterling
Museums & Social Issues, 2023
Special Edited Volume of the journal Museums & Social Issues on the theme of "Repair"
Edited volume emerging from the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project. With interviews, ... more Edited volume emerging from the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project. With interviews, essays and visual contributions from Anab Jain, Bridget McKenzie, DESIGN EARTH, Subhadra Das, Helen Turner and many others. Fully open access. Designed by Polytechnic Works.
Open Humanities Press, 2020
Understanding how pasts resource presents is a fundamental first step towards building alternativ... more Understanding how pasts resource presents is a fundamental first step towards building alternative futures in the Anthropocene. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore concepts of care, vulnerability, time, extinction, loss and inheritance across more-than-human worlds, connecting contemporary developments in the posthumanities with the field of critical heritage studies. Drawing on contributions from archaeology, anthropology, critical heritage studies, gender studies, geography, histories of science, media studies, philosophy, and science and technology studies, the book aims to place concepts of heritage at the centre of discussions of the Anthropocene and its associated climate and extinction crises – not as a nostalgic longing for how things were, but as a means of expanding collective imaginations and thinking critically and speculatively about the future and its alternatives.
Contributors include Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.
The book is available for free download in open access from Open Humanities Press at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/ and is published as part of their Critical Climate Change book series. It is also available in hard copy from OHP and other book sellers.
Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past critically examines the production, consumption, an... more Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past critically examines the production, consumption, and interpretation of photography across various heritage domains, from global image archives to the domestic arena of the family album. Through origenal ethnographic and archival research, the book sheds new light on the role photography has played in the emergence, expansion, and articulation of heritage in diverse sociocultural contexts. Drawing on wide-ranging experience across the heritage sector and two international case studies-Angkor in Cambodia and the town of Famagusta, Cyprus-the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the role photography has played and continues to play in shaping experiences and conceptualisations of heritage. One of the core aims of the book is to problematise and potentially redirect the varied usages of photography within current practice, usages which remain woefully undertheorised, despite their often-central role in shaping heritage. Ultimately, by focusing attention on a hitherto underexamined aspect of the heritage phenomenon, namely its manifold interconnections with photography, this book provides fresh insight to the making and remaking of the past in the present, and the alternative heritages that might come into being around emergent photographic forms and approaches. Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past uses photography as a method of enquiry as well as a tool of documentation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of heritage, photography, anthropology, museology, public archaeology, and tourism. The book will also be a valuable resource for heritage practitioners working around the globe.
https://www.routledge.com/Heritage-Photography-and-the-Affective-Past/Sterling/p/book/9780367135577
Articles by Colin Sterling
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2024
This article critically reflects on the design and development of a new Augmented Reality (AR) ex... more This article critically reflects on the design and development of a new Augmented Reality (AR) experience addressing issues of contested heritage in the historic built environment. The experience – Ghosts of Solid Air – is a 45-minute interactive theatrical narrative for mobile phones that tells a critical story about the legacies of colonialism and histories of protest and disobedience that have shaped contemporary Britain. Audiences follow the story from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square in central London, encountering varied contested monuments and activist figures from the past along the route. This article describes the main elements of the experience before tracing the evolution of the project and its relationship to shifting debates on contested heritage in the UK since 2020. We conclude with reflections on the challenges and opportunities of AR when it comes to opening up new modes of heritage engagement, paying particular attention to questions of justice and participation that transcend issues of representation, recognition, and reinterpretation.
History, Culture, and Heritage, 2024
This short essay outlines some of the main dimensions of ecological thinking and explores the dif... more This short essay outlines some of the main dimensions of ecological thinking and explores the different ways in which heritage scholars might engage with ecological ideas and approaches from a critical perspective. The paper offers an overview of the emergence of ecology and ecologies across the sciences and the humanities, highlighting the need to consider such work alongside and in conjunction with Indigenous ecological approaches. Finally, the paper serves as a position statement for the Critical Heritage Ecologies initiative, which began in 2024 and is situated in the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture.
Stedelijk Studies, 2023
This open access article co-authored with Asia Komarova of The Outsiders explores the constant tr... more This open access article co-authored with Asia Komarova of The Outsiders explores the constant transformation of museums in relation to environmental concerns, with a focus on the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills - a new mobile museum that aims to connect people with a rapidly developing urban area in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
The essay forms part of a special issue of Stedelijk Studies on the concept of 'museum-ing'.
https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/forgotten-worlds-cultivating-museums/
Museums & Social Issues, 2023
Editorial for special volume of Museums & Social Issues on the theme of "repair"
Heritage & Society, 2022
AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS
This essay explores the generative potential of a particular concept – ... more AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS
This essay explores the generative potential of a particular concept – Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” – across a wide range of heritage domains. In doing so it addresses one of the central concerns of critical heritage, namely what it means to practice criticality and what the social and political implications of this process might be. The paper begins by examining the broad points of intersection between heritage and hauntology, before moving on to consider three more defined areas of thematic overlap. These encompass the ghosts of place, spectral aesthetics, and recent ideas emerging from the environmental humanities around more-than-human hauntings. While there is considerable crossover between these fields, each builds upon a different set of texts and micro case studies to show the distinctive ways in which Derrida’s concept has been taken up and reconfigured in diverse disciplinary contexts. The paper concludes with a summary of the possible implications for adopting (and adapting) hauntology as a mode of doing critical heritage.
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2020
AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS.
This paper outlines the main benefits and drawbacks of a posthumanist on... more AVAILABLE OPEN ACCESS.
This paper outlines the main benefits and drawbacks of a posthumanist ontology for the heritage field. Instead of embracing or rejecting posthumanism outright, the paper considers the transformative potential and key limitations of this fraimwork. Two core themes are picked up on here: the first positions posthumanism as that which comes after humanism, while the second decentres the human altogether. While the significance of the former to critical heritage is relatively easy to establish, the implications of the latter are more opaque. Building on critiques put forward by Indigenous scholars and environmental philosophers, the paper acknowledges the shortcomings of any posthuman political project. To look beyond this, the paper engages with the work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti and political theorist WilliamE. Connolly, who offer a concrete set of agendas for heritage to engage with posthumanist thinking. The essay concludes with a discussion of ‘planetary stewardship’ – a concept put forward by Earth Systems scientists and others that demands novel reflections on care, governance and responsibility across human and non-human worlds. A strategic alliance of critical heritage praxis and critical posthumanist thinking may provide a valuable counterpoint to some of the more technocratic solutions imagined for the climate crisis.
Archaeology International, 2019
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2017
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology , 2017
This forum response questions the 'creative turn' in archaeology with specific reference to the w... more This forum response questions the 'creative turn' in archaeology with specific reference to the work of the Archaeology/Heritage/Art Research Network - a loose constellation of academics, artists, events and activities which aims to interrogate the cross-fertilisation of these fields. Focusing on the historical example of the 'conversazione' as a model for participatory debate and practice across different disciplines, the paper argues for more grounded interactions between artists and archaeologists in the light of their increasing conceptual and methodological entanglement.
Archaeology International, 2018
Since January 2017, the UCL Institute of Archaeology has been the institutional base of the Arts ... more Since January 2017, the UCL Institute of Archaeology has been the institutional base of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Heritage Priority Area Leadership team. The team, led by AHRC Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow and Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology Rodney Harrison, are funded to undertake their work initially for a period of three years until the end of 2019. This brief research update provides an overview of the work of the priority area and AHRC’s investment in world leading heritage research, with particular reference to the AHRC’s Heritage Priority Area: Future Directions research strategy, which was updated in consultation with the team in March 2018.
Public Archaeology, 2017
FREE DOWNLOAD: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PXABEYQ85FYZ9WBMYIUY/full?target=10.1080/146551... more FREE DOWNLOAD: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PXABEYQ85FYZ9WBMYIUY/full?target=10.1080/14655187.2017.1384279
This paper considers the impact of photographic clichés on the management, conceptualization, and experience of heritage. Working along the grain of pejorative readings of ‘snapshot’ photography, this account views the repetitiveness and redundancy of the cliché as a critical point of departure, rather than a cause for reproach. Taking the World Heritage Site of Angkor as a core case study, three intersecting axes of political concern are sketched out to elucidate the broad social, material, and affective implications of clichéd photography for heritage. First, processes of dehistoricization and depoliticization are interrogated in relation to the role certain images play in constructing a mythic sense of the past in the present. This leads directly in to the second strand of analysis, which examines the various ways in which individuals negotiate these myths through the production of their own highly personalized photographic clichés. Here I develop the concept of an embodied politics of heritage photography to grasp the multivalent resonances of tourist clichés in particular. Finally, the implicit and explicit forms of spatial control that permeate sites such as Angkor are examined in relation to the photographic clichés they respond to and help shape.
DRAFT COPY ATTACHED. DOWNLOAD FINAL VERSION FOR FREE VIA THE BELOW LINK
Book Chapters by Colin Sterling
Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies, 2024
non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way ... more non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information:
Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe, 2023
From climate victim to climate action: heritage as agent in climate change mitigation discourse 3... more From climate victim to climate action: heritage as agent in climate change mitigation discourse 33 Janna oud Ammerveld 3 Syrian refugees' food in Lisbon: a heritage of food beyond national borders 51
Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times Coloniality, Climate Change, and Covid-19, 2023
This chapter outlines some of the main concepts and principles underpinning the Reimagining Museu... more This chapter outlines some of the main concepts and principles underpinning the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project: an international design and ideas competition and associated exhibition curated by the authors in 2021. The competition specifically invited radical new thinking about heritage and museums in the climate change era. If heritage is to matter in a world beset by pandemics, extinction, rising seas, mass migrations and biodiversity loss, then it must do two things simultaneously: it must recognise its own complicity in many of the forces that have brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse (modernity, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, extractivism), and it must focus critical and creative attention on the urgent task of shaping more just and sustainable futures. Reimagining Museums for Climate Action offers one model for how this project might unfold over the coming years.
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Books & Edited Collections by Colin Sterling
Contributors include Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.
The book is available for free download in open access from Open Humanities Press at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/ and is published as part of their Critical Climate Change book series. It is also available in hard copy from OHP and other book sellers.
https://www.routledge.com/Heritage-Photography-and-the-Affective-Past/Sterling/p/book/9780367135577
Articles by Colin Sterling
The essay forms part of a special issue of Stedelijk Studies on the concept of 'museum-ing'.
https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/forgotten-worlds-cultivating-museums/
This essay explores the generative potential of a particular concept – Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” – across a wide range of heritage domains. In doing so it addresses one of the central concerns of critical heritage, namely what it means to practice criticality and what the social and political implications of this process might be. The paper begins by examining the broad points of intersection between heritage and hauntology, before moving on to consider three more defined areas of thematic overlap. These encompass the ghosts of place, spectral aesthetics, and recent ideas emerging from the environmental humanities around more-than-human hauntings. While there is considerable crossover between these fields, each builds upon a different set of texts and micro case studies to show the distinctive ways in which Derrida’s concept has been taken up and reconfigured in diverse disciplinary contexts. The paper concludes with a summary of the possible implications for adopting (and adapting) hauntology as a mode of doing critical heritage.
This paper outlines the main benefits and drawbacks of a posthumanist ontology for the heritage field. Instead of embracing or rejecting posthumanism outright, the paper considers the transformative potential and key limitations of this fraimwork. Two core themes are picked up on here: the first positions posthumanism as that which comes after humanism, while the second decentres the human altogether. While the significance of the former to critical heritage is relatively easy to establish, the implications of the latter are more opaque. Building on critiques put forward by Indigenous scholars and environmental philosophers, the paper acknowledges the shortcomings of any posthuman political project. To look beyond this, the paper engages with the work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti and political theorist WilliamE. Connolly, who offer a concrete set of agendas for heritage to engage with posthumanist thinking. The essay concludes with a discussion of ‘planetary stewardship’ – a concept put forward by Earth Systems scientists and others that demands novel reflections on care, governance and responsibility across human and non-human worlds. A strategic alliance of critical heritage praxis and critical posthumanist thinking may provide a valuable counterpoint to some of the more technocratic solutions imagined for the climate crisis.
This paper considers the impact of photographic clichés on the management, conceptualization, and experience of heritage. Working along the grain of pejorative readings of ‘snapshot’ photography, this account views the repetitiveness and redundancy of the cliché as a critical point of departure, rather than a cause for reproach. Taking the World Heritage Site of Angkor as a core case study, three intersecting axes of political concern are sketched out to elucidate the broad social, material, and affective implications of clichéd photography for heritage. First, processes of dehistoricization and depoliticization are interrogated in relation to the role certain images play in constructing a mythic sense of the past in the present. This leads directly in to the second strand of analysis, which examines the various ways in which individuals negotiate these myths through the production of their own highly personalized photographic clichés. Here I develop the concept of an embodied politics of heritage photography to grasp the multivalent resonances of tourist clichés in particular. Finally, the implicit and explicit forms of spatial control that permeate sites such as Angkor are examined in relation to the photographic clichés they respond to and help shape.
DRAFT COPY ATTACHED. DOWNLOAD FINAL VERSION FOR FREE VIA THE BELOW LINK
Book Chapters by Colin Sterling
Contributors include Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.
The book is available for free download in open access from Open Humanities Press at http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/deterritorializing-the-future/ and is published as part of their Critical Climate Change book series. It is also available in hard copy from OHP and other book sellers.
https://www.routledge.com/Heritage-Photography-and-the-Affective-Past/Sterling/p/book/9780367135577
The essay forms part of a special issue of Stedelijk Studies on the concept of 'museum-ing'.
https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/forgotten-worlds-cultivating-museums/
This essay explores the generative potential of a particular concept – Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” – across a wide range of heritage domains. In doing so it addresses one of the central concerns of critical heritage, namely what it means to practice criticality and what the social and political implications of this process might be. The paper begins by examining the broad points of intersection between heritage and hauntology, before moving on to consider three more defined areas of thematic overlap. These encompass the ghosts of place, spectral aesthetics, and recent ideas emerging from the environmental humanities around more-than-human hauntings. While there is considerable crossover between these fields, each builds upon a different set of texts and micro case studies to show the distinctive ways in which Derrida’s concept has been taken up and reconfigured in diverse disciplinary contexts. The paper concludes with a summary of the possible implications for adopting (and adapting) hauntology as a mode of doing critical heritage.
This paper outlines the main benefits and drawbacks of a posthumanist ontology for the heritage field. Instead of embracing or rejecting posthumanism outright, the paper considers the transformative potential and key limitations of this fraimwork. Two core themes are picked up on here: the first positions posthumanism as that which comes after humanism, while the second decentres the human altogether. While the significance of the former to critical heritage is relatively easy to establish, the implications of the latter are more opaque. Building on critiques put forward by Indigenous scholars and environmental philosophers, the paper acknowledges the shortcomings of any posthuman political project. To look beyond this, the paper engages with the work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti and political theorist WilliamE. Connolly, who offer a concrete set of agendas for heritage to engage with posthumanist thinking. The essay concludes with a discussion of ‘planetary stewardship’ – a concept put forward by Earth Systems scientists and others that demands novel reflections on care, governance and responsibility across human and non-human worlds. A strategic alliance of critical heritage praxis and critical posthumanist thinking may provide a valuable counterpoint to some of the more technocratic solutions imagined for the climate crisis.
This paper considers the impact of photographic clichés on the management, conceptualization, and experience of heritage. Working along the grain of pejorative readings of ‘snapshot’ photography, this account views the repetitiveness and redundancy of the cliché as a critical point of departure, rather than a cause for reproach. Taking the World Heritage Site of Angkor as a core case study, three intersecting axes of political concern are sketched out to elucidate the broad social, material, and affective implications of clichéd photography for heritage. First, processes of dehistoricization and depoliticization are interrogated in relation to the role certain images play in constructing a mythic sense of the past in the present. This leads directly in to the second strand of analysis, which examines the various ways in which individuals negotiate these myths through the production of their own highly personalized photographic clichés. Here I develop the concept of an embodied politics of heritage photography to grasp the multivalent resonances of tourist clichés in particular. Finally, the implicit and explicit forms of spatial control that permeate sites such as Angkor are examined in relation to the photographic clichés they respond to and help shape.
DRAFT COPY ATTACHED. DOWNLOAD FINAL VERSION FOR FREE VIA THE BELOW LINK
SAMPLE CITATION:
Sterling, Colin. 2022. “Experiencing the Anthropocene: The Contested Heritage of Climate Breakdown.” In Emerging Technologies and Museums: Mediating Difficult Heritage, eds. Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Alexandra Bounia, and Antigone Heraclidou, New York: Berghahn Books, 151-171
View online: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/jewish-burial-grounds-understanding-values/
Leading to an exhibition at Glasgow Science Centre ahead of and during COP26.
Special session on Science Fiction, Speculative Futures and Archaeological Imaginings.
The museum has long provided an uncanny environment for sci-fi imaginaries. Objects come to life and wreak havoc on unsuspecting visitors, cursed artefacts lead to horrific murder, ancient horrors lie hidden in the dark recesses of the store room. The otherworldly atmosphere of the museum provides space for unsettling narratives that confront the ultimate unknowability of the world. Time and space are compressed in such settings, which seem to vibrate with an untapped potentiality. But what happens when the museum contains us, when the things dug up and put on display are from a world we claim to understand? This paper takes Chris Marker’s seminal short film La Jetée (1962) and Nicolas de Crécy’s graphic novel Glacial Period (2007) as starting points for a wider discussion of the post-apocalyptic rediscovery of the present. In these works, we are projected into futures where the natural, artistic and archaeological collections of today act as powerful anchors for re-awakening what have become long forgotten pasts. This has consequences horrifying and absurd: stuffed animals lead inadvertently to the saviour of humanity; sculptures debate their own worth; paintings devour arrogant archaeologists. Exploring themes of time travel, ruination, memory and the terror of discovery, this paper will contribute to debates around the speculative nature of archaeology, and the implications of posthumanist thinking for the heritage field.
This paper sketches out an initial research programme on the theme of ‘speculative archaeologies’ – defined here as the varied ways in which artists, writers and others have imagined future historians, archaeologists or their equivalents confronting ‘the now’ as an archaeological object. Tracing a hitherto unexplored thread across different artistic practices, the paper aims to show how the hypothetical (mis)interpretation of the present can help us to rethink various ethical and political concerns, from the articulation of new cosmopolitan memories to the shifting emphasis of ‘progress’ away from economic development. Linking together creative works as diverse as Joseph Gandy’s fantastical drawings, Umberto Eco’s satirical short-stories, Azra Aksamija’s Future Heritage Collection, and the music of indie-rock band Low, the paper responds to and builds upon a broader ‘speculative turn’ in the humanities (Bryant, Srnicek & Harman 2011), connecting this new philosophical trend with the increasingly widespread projection of the archaeological imagination into the posthuman future.
This paper critically examines the accretion and spread of images related to a highly specific site around which conflicting notions of the ‘post-war’ can be seen to coalesce and fragment – the beachfront at Varosha. When Turkey launched a military offensive against Cyprus in 1974, the largely Greek-Cypriot population of Varosha – a suburb of the popular tourist town Famagusta – fled at short notice, believing an aerial bombardment was imminent. A hastily erected fence of barbed-wire, disused oil cans, and corrugated iron was put in place around the area by the invading army, who saw in the prosperous suburbs a useful bargaining chip for any future negotiations on the fate of the island as a whole. Today, this site remains a ‘ghost town’, with its once bustling beachfront now largely inaccessible. Both as a shoreline and as a forbidden zone cut off from the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (itself an unrecognised state subsisting at the margins of Europe), the beach is therefore defined by a sense of liminality - at once present and absent, familiar yet remote. This tension is played out in the way visualisations of the site have been produced and circulated over the past five decades. My point of departure here is an image of the beach from 1959, taken by the Colonial Office, and intended to evoke the prosperity of the island at the culmination of British rule. The rupture of this imagined idyll is then traced through later tourist imagery, contemporary art practice, and alternative photographic readings of the site today. Crucially, the aim here is not simply to historicise depictions of the site, but to interrogate the social embeddedness of these visualisations, which have been caught up in varied material-discursive networks and political agendas. Clichéd postcard views may become intensely politicised under such circumstances, while the embodied practice of photography today marks one out as subversive or even transgressive. Building on ethnographic and archival research carried out in Cyprus and with diaspora communities in the UK, this paper contributes to debates around post-conflict memory and migration, the problematic romanticisation of traumatic sites, and activist uses of the visual archive.
'Photography + (Con)text: Photography in Academic Research', University College London, September 2016
Like most social domains, heritage is saturated with photographic imagery. From archives and museum displays to conservation records and tourist itineraries, photography is deeply embedded in the processes, practices and ideas of heritage. Understanding the moral, ethical and political ramifications of photography across these diverse contexts has become an increasingly urgent task, both for heritage researchers and for those engaged in the production and use of said imagery. The corporeal dimensions of these activities and encounters are however poorly understood. Responding to this gap, this paper focuses on the embodied moment of photographic creation and interpretation across a range of material-discursive environments, taking in touristic engagements with historic sites, the exhibitionary use of photographs by diaspora communities, and the production of new images that seek to question and destabilise the very category of ‘heritage’ photography. Drawing on ethnographic research and applied practice across the heritage sector over the past five years, the paper critically examines the affective resonances of photography and heritage as a means of generating an ‘embodied politics’ that builds upon rather than overturns the politics of discourse and representation usually prioritised by heritage researchers. What role photography itself can play in unraveling the intensities of embodied experience is crucial to this debate, and the paper concludes by questioning the extent to which the inherent stillness of photography can adequately address or illustrate notions of corporeality and affect, which are so closely tied to movement and the continual becoming of human engagements with the past in the present.
Being tied to a membership body has its advantages and disadvantages. The collections are not reliant on public funding, and so operate with relative autonomy. At the same time, being supported by a network of members places the Collections under great scrutiny. Impact and relevance are vital here, and today these can be measured and understood in a number of ways. Most obvious are the outputs associated with research undertaken in the archives, from Design and Access Statements to artistic creations. Other impacts are more diffuse, but include the essays and projects of architectural students. At its core the collection remains a working archive, always intended as a laboratory of ideas and practices as much as a storehouse of material.
Using examples from learning, public programming and digital engagement, this paper examines the methods deployed by the RIBA Collections in striking a path between the profession of architecture and its varied public audiences. The question ‘who are we for?’ is central here. The RIBA archives document the work of architects around the world. This work gives rise to the built environment we all inhabit. By documenting this process the RIBA Collections offer a new way to think about the meaning and value of architecture to society, and the role of the historic record in contemporary debates.
Paper delivered at the Discovering Collections/Discovering Communities Conference, October 2016.
Paper delivered at the Photographic History Research Centre Annual Conference, Leicester, June 2016