Call for Papers – Uppsala University Workshop, Cultural Heritage in Conflicts

The Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Resolution, in cooperation with the Department of Historic Preservation, are planning an international workshop on cultural heritage in conflicts and how heritage interacts with peace and conflict.

The workshop will take place from 15–16 September 2016 at the Uppsala University Campus Gotland, Visby, Sweden, and Akram Ilja (Palestine, ITP 2012) has kindly invited members of our ITP network to send in abstracts to present at the workshop.

Further, as part of the ITP’s commitment to further engagement, we are delighted to offer any ITP participant chosen to present, a return flight and accommodation for the workshop days.

Some of the topics that the workshop hopes to address are:

“Armed conflicts cause human suffering and damage to economy and society, but they also affect cultural heritage in communities. We often read about or see heritage sites being damaged in war, but disputes over the right to or access to cultural heritage can also be a cause of conflict. The scholar of post-war recovery Sultan Barakat has proposed that we should understand “cultural heritage and war as highly mutable and interlinked processes of social transformation”.

Thus, conflicts often lead to, or are shaped by, interpretations of the past since memories are used for constructing (or dismounting) identities and links between the past, the present and the future. Why is cultural heritage targeted in some conflicts? Are disputes over the past of a place more frequent in certain types of conflict, and if so, why? How are heritage, identity, ethnicity and history turned into assets, which can either raise the level of conflict, or serve to build peace and reconciliation? How is post-conflict society affected by interpretations of the past and visions of the future?”

If you would like to present a paper at the workshop, please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Professor Mattias Legnér, Department of Art History, Mattias.Legner@konstvet.uu.se by 17 May 2016.

More information can be found here.

If you decide to submit a paper, do let us know, and good luck!

Emma