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The AHM 2024 Annual Conference is organized to celebrate the 10th anniversary of AHM and to highlight the school’s research-teaching-society nexus in its analysis of diverse forms and dynamics of heritage, memory and material. Over the past decade, AHM has dedicated significant endeavours and resources to ‘the making of the school’. While this process is still in development, the school has now become a prominent intellectual hub and a home for more than 165 scholars and early career researchers. The primary focus of their work revolves around the tangible and the intangible remains of the past and the reciprocal relations between objects and meanings, as well as the dynamics of heritage, memory and material culture.

The relationship between heritage, memory and material culture has always been of great relevance to society. After all, heritage has for decades already been understood as socially produced and fabricated. David Löwenthal (1998) argued that heritage should be regarded as a socially produced version of history, a version of the past easier to embrace by the general public. Heritage thus could be understood as a version of the past constructed in the present, in many ways informed by our memory, our perspective of what we believed happened, and provided a physical reality by material culture (Smith 2006), which has in turn been interpreted through this memory. According to David Harvey (2001), heritage must be understood as constructed in the present and therefore informed and valued by a society’s collective temporal experience. Heritage might therefore be less concerned with the past and more concerned with how to preserve certain narratives of the past for the future, or as stated by Rodney Harrison et al. (2020), as a dynamic practice of future-making. 

    This practice of future-making and the construction of the past in the present as heritage is recognized as an integral part to the formation and construction of identities by scholars who lay the theoretical foundations for the studies of the fields of heritage, memory, and material culture, such as Harvey (2001), Löwenthal (1998) and Graham (1998). Another influential scholar in the fields of heritage and memory, Laurajane Smith (2006), argued that material culture as heritage provides a physical representation and reality to abstract concepts such as identity. Our socially constructed version of the past informs our, national and localized identities. Heritage plays an integral part in identity-making, illustrating the exclusive nature of heritage, and underlining its importance as a a tool of power deeply entangled with the notion of ‘identity politics’. In the process of fabricating heritage through in relation to memory and material culture (often through the guise of preserving the past for future generations), an exclusive narrative is constructed, which becomes part of one group’s identity. This interplay between heritage and identity is perhaps where the social impact of the study of heritage, memory, and material culture becomes most apparent. In exploring these questions, we gain the ability to deconstruct the notion of identity as informed by heritage and question the ways in which the past is constantly re-negotiated in the media, in cultural practices, and in public debates in the present. 

AHM offers a distinctive and unparalleled approach to examining and understanding heritage and memory. It employs an integrative, interdisciplinary, and critical approach to problematising, conceptualising, and analysing heritage and memory acts, material culture management practices, policies, and politics at all levels within Europe and worldwide. The AHM Annual Conference, taking place in Amsterdam on June 20-21, is a celebration of AHM’s 10th anniversary. AHM at 10 conference showcases the interdisciplinary and transnational research conducted across several fields within the school. The conference also aims to foster a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional dialogue between AHM’s research and societal partner organizations in order to explore and discuss questions and problems that are relevant in the fields of heritage, memory, and material culture today, both within and beyond the university.

The AHM at 10 conference and this proceedings volume include contributions discussing a wide range of topics, such as the novel tools and approaches utilized in the examination of materialities, as well as the application of digital methods in the fields of heritage studies and archaeology. In our contemporary world, materiality is increasingly being influenced and moulded by cutting-edge and groundbreaking techniques and instruments that transform and redefine our perception and engagement with materials. These innovative tools and modern approaches to materiality not only enable us to produce shapes, interpretations, structures, and even new research avenues that were previously inconceivable, but also enrich a profound understanding of the characteristics, particularities, and intangibilities of materials. By incorporating pioneering tools in the analysis and scrutinization of materialities, researchers have the capacity to transform our relationship with the surrounding material culture, resulting in a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary study approach to materialities. 

At the same time, the use of digital tools and methods in the domain of heritage has had a noteworthy impact on the examination of heritage, archaeology, and other disciplines that investigate the material culture of both the past and present. The digital realm offers researchers and professionals  a myriad of approaches that have the potential to enhance the practices and processes of identifying, preserving, reconstructing, interpreting, making accessible, raising awareness about, and transmitting our shared heritage. Digital tools provide immersive experiences that transcend geographical boundaries, allowing various audiences and general public to have an enhanced access to cultural assets. In fact, the utilisation of digital tools and technologies in the examination of both tangible and intangible past remains, as well as in the contemporary forensic investigation of mass graves, serves as a prime example and a living embodiment of interdisciplinarity in research.

Some of the topics highlighted in the AHM at 10 conference are the problematic challenging legacies of colonialism, collections held in Western museums, restitution, and the impact of museums in societies. The AHM at 10 conference and its proceedings volume seek to offer a critical reflection that is much needed in present times, and particularly in the contemporary academic debate concerning oral history, the innovation in documentation and photography, semantics of memory, and geopolitics of heritage and identity. Examining colonial heritage has been a central focus of research and a key topic of investigation within AHM due to its exploration of the methods and societal implications of addressing complex ethical dilemmas, sensitive cultural matters, and the need for accurate historical contextualisation of events, narratives, and (hi)stories that took place during colonial times. The papers in this proceedings volume have investigated the potentials of curating colonialism and have focused on closely examining the intricate elements of colonial legacies, cultural appropriations and power dynamics encountered in cinematic and literary representations, and academic literature, as well as in Western museums. The focus has emerged to underscore the crucial role that decolonial practices in museums can play in challenging prevailing narratives, promoting and fostering dialogue, and granting the voices of marginalised communities with an opportunity, and indeed the entitlement, to engage with and digitally accessing their stolen collections as well as rewriting and reshaping their historic narratives. The role of museums in our contemporary societies has far greater impact as those cultural institutions have a key responsibility and multifaceted role in being custodians of historical artefacts, producers and disseminators of knowledge on the past, and curators of cultural memories. As a place of social engagement and edutainment, museums offer the general public as well as the scholars with a platform to engage with and critically reflect on disputed histories, competing memories, and contemporary issues related to social changes. 

The objective of the AHM at 10 conference and this proceedings volume is to bring together AHM scholars, early-career researchers, PhD candidates, practitioners, and professionals for the purpose of showcasing their work. The selection of topics was based on and involved the main AHM research themes and beyond, including Museums and Memorials, Heritage and Conflict, Transnational Memory Narratives, Digitality and E-Memory, and Materiality and Material Culture. The organizing committee received over 50 paper abstracts covering a diverse array of topics and exploring various theoretical and thought-provoking case studies from throughout the globe. 

The papers in this volume have been curated within six themes that present a combination of AHM’s research themes, the topics of the conference sessions, as well as current developments and challenges in the fields of heritage, memory, and material culture. ‘Museums and Society’ presents two examples of the importance and relevance of museum collections and museum professionals to society, through the presentation of the Allard Pierson’s Surinamica project, and the FAIR use of oral histories in conservation studies. ‘Contested Memories’ presents a range of topics covered during the conference that deal with legacies of colonialism and loss, restitution and accessibility of collections, as well as the collective memories of these pasts. ‘Heritage in Writing’ considers two examples of writing and printing as objects of study in the fields of heritage, memory, and material culture, by considering the role of literary fiction writing and the impact of new printed media. ‘Materiality of Heritage’ presents three case studies in material culture, such as women’s gowns and silverware, and shows the relationship between material culture as heritage and a society that values it as such. It does so by illustrating what material culture can tell us about individual lives and common practices, both within the field of heritage studies and beyond. ‘Heritage and Digitality’ includes a range of projects that illustrate the technological shift of heritage studies. These projects not only focus on digital research tools, but also address how technological developments change the practice of studying heritage. Lastly, ‘The Future of Heritage Studies’ presents three examples of research that considers the potential challenges for and developments of the fields of heritage, memory and material culture in the future. These include the decolonization of elite cultural practices, the development of low-cost digitization and registration methods and critical heritage ecologies as a new approach to the sustainability of our heritage practices. 

Ihab Saloul

University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Read more about the organizing institution: The Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM)