By Dr. Alejandro Mora Motta

Next Seminars:

15 January 2026
Provenance and Personhood: Unfolding the Story of the Kandy Ring – Dr Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka
Discussant: Dr Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa.

As a space for experimentation and dialogue, the Global Heritage Lab Seminar 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.

The seminar invites a critical debate on ‘heritage’ construed as the material and immaterial inheritance of past ecological and socio-cultural phenomena and their political and economic interdependencies in the present and futures, addressing reflections on multiple processes of coloniality and building practices of decoloniality. Speakers are invited to discuss their creative processes with an emphasis on the immaterial and material dimensions of heritage and locating the museum and curatorial practice as well as ethnographic and participatory methods as mediums of transdisciplinary scholarship. Scholars and practitioners are especially invited to reflect on heritage beyond the Westerncentric/Eurocentric canons in dialogue with positions from the Global South, on the transformational processes of heritage making, on museums and their public, on the histories of collecting, restitution, and on the new ethics of global co-existence.

The GHL Seminar Series is organised in panels and single lectures in a hybrid format. The in-person lectures will be held at the GHL Seminar room at Poststrasse 26, 1^st Floor. To participate online, please register using this link. The seminar is held from 16:00 to 18:00 CEST/CET on one Thursday of each month in the winter and summer terms annually.