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The origins of this category and critical concept lie in Dr Robertson's interest in the way local communities have sought to put the past to use in the present. A strong interest in public histories in the Scottish Highlands, both individual and communal, has brought significant opportunities for collaboration with, and dissemination to, local history organisations and other community groups. Further impact includes: the curating of an art exhibition; engaging with practitioners to explore the ways in which memories of flooding can be utilised in future resilience; contributions to debates on land and identity in the Scottish Highlands.
Successive Scottish Governments, local authorities, statutory bodies and sector agencies have sought to address issues of community (re)engagement with their historic environment within community-building and place-making social agendas. Through History Tomorrow, our commercial history unit, we have been central to initiatives designed to restore property of the past to communities. Our major impact is with Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) projects like Prestongrange, Kilmun, and the Ochils Landscape Partnership (OLP), where community volunteers were trained and empowered to undertake their own research, thereafter becoming trainers themselves. Imparting such training skills to community volunteers restores a sense of possession of their `own' histories and effectively inculcates post-funding sustainability amongst them.
Dr Watson's research is concerned with the understanding of heritage as a cultural phenomenon and the ways in which this is represented in tourism and in public engagement. The research has focussed on a re-theorisation of issues such as visuality and representation in the public sphere of cultural and heritage tourism and the ways in which this is implicated in modalities of marketing, destination development and the community management of cultural heritage resources. He has sought opportunities to apply this thinking in the real experience of tourism management and marketing in the City of York, one of the world's foremost heritage tourism destinations.
Since the Bradford Riots in 2001, research at Bradford has helped to defuse underlying tensions between deprived, multiethnic communities and between them and the local state thus strengthening community resilience in the city. Building on global research, particularly in Latin America, we have introduced participatory and peace-building methodologies into the locality, but with implications beyond it. The Programme for a Peaceful City enhances our impact through academic-practitioner reflection spaces. Our research with rather than on communities fosters their voice in policy, contributing to a non-confrontational response to the EDL in 2010, 2012 and 2013 and bringing community activists from Bradford's diverse communities together to co-create the ESRC-funded Community University (Comm-Uni-ty) in May 2013.
This research has had transformational impacts: systematically providing evidence of the state of cultural heritage policies concerning nine countries in South East Europe; identifying the need for management tools to integrate inventories, environmental and spatial planning, heritage protection and funding mechanisms for projects to enable sustainable use of heritage resources; helping shape a Council of Europe regional programme; creating the framework for legal/administration reform requests by the states concerned; and has led to technical assistance actions, jointly funded by the Council of Europe and the European Commission, including monitoring to ensure the institutionalisation of methodologies in national policies and strategies.
Kyriakidis's research has had impact on policy-makers within both national and local government. This has involved a scaling up of his impact activities that were based in Gonies (Crete) to include both national policy-makers and international organisations. As a result, he has become an influential international authority on the development of greater public engagement with heritage sites (including Pompeii), and on public policy in Greece. His research has resulted in a shift in policy at the Athens University of Economics and Business, which now engages with the provision of training in Heritage Management and is branching out from exclusively finance-based education. His CPD (Continuing Professional Development) courses have reached out to the commercial sector (particularly Leica).
2The European funded ISAAC Project aimed to enhance the relationship between heritage and tourism in urban destinations through a novel Information Communication Technology (ICT) environment. The platform provided integrated and user-friendly tourism e-services facilitating an advanced access to European cultural heritage assets. Within this project the Sunderland team worked with a wide community of stakeholders to identify intangible aspects and stories worthwhile to be told within a destination. These stories were integrated in an interpretative strategy independent of, but aligned with destinations' current marketing and positioning strategies. The specific impact focuses on three destinations, Leipzig, Amsterdam and Genoa.
This case study describes the pioneering work undertaken with the Sultanate of Oman government to develop appropriate approaches towards sustainable documentation, management and renewal of 86 priority heritage sites of its 1000-plus vernacular settlements. Approaches established through a pilot project - now extended to 9 settlements (5 completed) including 3 World-Heritage- Sites - are helping Oman achieve a cohesive strategy and have instigated a thorough revision of the priority list. Wide-ranging stakeholder engagement was achieved through exhibitions, public lectures, workshops, press interviews (Arabic/English) and heritage-related film-production. The continued `capacity building' and employment of young graduates through skills development training has provided the social enterprise dimension.
Professor Paul Heritage joined QMUL in 1996. His research over the last two decades has opened up new understandings of Brazil's transformative arts practices within the UK cultural sector. Through practice-based projects, his research continues to deepen and extend the understanding of innovative Brazilian arts practices in Britain. Heritage has forged new opportunities for UK arts practitioners to develop their work in Brazil and shaped new policy exchanges between ministerial/governmental and non-governmental organisations. His research engages with a diverse range of artists and cultural institutions, reaching over 50,000 people in the period since 2008 via performances/screenings/seminars/exhibitions/events. Through disseminating research into Brazilian culture policy and practices that have responded to extreme social crises, he has strengthened the British cultural sector's confidence in using art in the advancement of social development.
The Peoples-based Conservation Project (PBC) has challenged conventional heritage conservation practice by privileging a community's cultural systems over universalised concepts of heritage, through participatory practice. This transformed conservation practice by transferring the focus from material preservation to developing and preserving the connections between people, their cultural heritage, and each other. This new approach has developed a shared responsibility between the National Trust and Maori in the UK and New Zealand for the care of Hinemihi, an historic Maori meeting house which is no longer conserved as an object of built heritage, but as the living focus of a network of reciprocal social relationships.