The GHL seminar series continues this Thursday from 4 to 6 pm in our GHL Seminar room at Poststraße 26, 1st Floor. As a space for experimentation and dialogue, the series seeks to critically explore multiple pasts and presents to envision alternative futures. It aims to bring scholars and practitioners from across the globe together to engage, interact and address the current global multi-faceted crisis involving economic, ecological, social and cultural challenges and negotiations of heritage and museums as powerfully charged, conflictual, and creative spaces.
This seminar session brings two scholars to reflect on bottom-up heritage-making in Vietnam and China:
Heritagisation, Digitalisation and Community Involvement: the Case of Phong Nha – Ke Bang National Park, Vietnam
Dr. Quyen Mai
Center for Knowledge Co-creation and Development, Hue City, Vietnam
Abstract: Heritagisation refers to the process that revitalises certain things of the past with new meanings, cultural significance, and functions in the present. The process is commonly controlled by the powerful elites at both global and national levels. Questioning the actual position of the community in this process, the study takes Phong Nha – Ke Bang National Park – a natural World Heritage site in Vietnam – as the case study. Adopting the theory of networks and flows, it focuses on the re-integration of designated Park into the wider contemporary contexts when new values are being imagined and promoted. The study finds out that in the heritagisation of the Park, groups of community are manoeuvring their way to bypass the elites’ dominance through ICTs innovations. Digitalisation becomes an effective way for local people not only to get connected but also to increase their political and economic power. This finding suggests opportunities for the local people to actively engage and better achieve their interests in the politics of heritage-making.
Keywords: heritagisation, digitalisation, community, involvement.
About: Quyen Mai has been studying the revitalisation of World Heritage sites in Vietnam since 2013. She graduated with her PhD with Magna Cum Laude in 2020 from the University of Bonn, from where she was acknowledged with the Early Career Researchers Award two years later for her academic contribution to heritage communication.
Confucian Education ‘Revived’: Memory, Future and Unusual Places in Heritage Making
Dr. Sandra Gilgan
Head of Unit, Bonn Research Alliance (BORA), University of Bonn
Abstract: In the early 2000s, traditional Confucian education re-emerged in China in the context of so-called ‘study halls’ and ‘academies’. The goal of involving parents, teachers, and headmasters is to cultivate modern virtuous persons through an approach called ‘classics-reading education’. Even though they allude to deep historical roots, these contemporary facilities are novel (re)creations, developed on peoples’ initiative and in response to current needs. In my presentation, I will show how ordinary places, from converted vacation resorts to people’s own living rooms, become sites of Confucian heritage making. They are filled with practices of ‘Confucian education’ which are connected with peoples’ hopes for the future and memories of the past. Their ‘new’ tradition-making reflects needs and shortcomings in contemporary society.
About: Sandra Gilgan is a cultural scientist (PhD) with regional expertise in China, and a science manager with several years of experience in the fields of sustainability research, Chinese studies and international affairs. She studied and researched at the Universities of Münster, Trier, and Bonn, the National Chengchi University in Taipei, R.O.C., and Xiamen University in China. Her main research interests are Confucianism (seen through philosophical as well as sociological lenses), ‘utopian thinking’ and ‘utopia as method’ in social science approaches (e.g., to climate change), and ‘plural sustainabilities’. She is engaged in inter- and transdisciplinary research initiatives. Currently, she is a Co-Leader of the working group on ‘Alternative Sustainabilities’ on the German Committee of Future Earth; Co-Editor of a collaborative book project on ‘Sustainabilities Beyond Disciplines’ with an international group of authors; and Co-Coordinator of the Bonn Platform for Forced Migration Studies. Her current position is the Head of Unit of the Bonn Research Alliance (BORA) at the University of Bonn which aims to strengthen the interaction between the university and so-called non-university research institutions, such as the Max Planck and Leibniz institutes.
Join us at the Global Heritage Lab at P26 or online:
https://uni-bonn.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/u5EufumhqTovHdegkO73s2hG22H4qBp_YOAT