Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This US-Spain IRES project will provide an early-career international research experience for fifteen undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Five Colleges consortium. Participants will conduct systematic, comparative research around the theme of "Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)" in collaboration with the graduate Program in Cul-tural Management at the University of Barcelona in Spain. For each of the three years, research projects will be organized around a central research stream: 1) "Memory, monuments, and commemoration," 2) "Multicultural heritage in Europe" and 3) "Producing localities." By developing their projects in relation to a central set of research questions, students will contribute to three key areas of inquiry for global, comparative investigation of cultural heritage as a site of contestation, conflict, and cohesion. Anthropol-ogists have critically engaged the concepts of culture and heritage for decades, but the rise of the field of heritage management offers new opportunities for ethnographic investigation of how core disciplinary concepts are used by policymakers, citizens, and other social actors. The proposed program provides an integrative framework for an ethnographic field school that will draw the participation of students across the four subfields of anthropology and serve as a model for interdisciplinary teambuilding in applied heritage anthropology. Government institutions face new demands to develop public programming that reflects our nation's diverse, multicultural heritage, and there is a growing need for social scientists trained in applied heritage anthropology and related fields. Broader impacts of this project include: 1) training a diverse group of US students for international, comparative anthropological research on cultural heritage policies in multicul-tural, democratic societies; 2) developing scientific networks between anthropologists in the US and Spain that will form the basis for further international sponsored research; and 3) collaborating with faculty and students from Spain to produce a body of systematic, comparative research publications available to the public through an online project hub. This project will build synergistic initiatives between European partner institutions and the UMass Department of Anthropology, the Heritage and Society Studies and European Studies certificate programs, and the Five Colleges consortium.