Context 155 - July 2018

C O N T E X T 1 5 5 : J U L Y 2 0 1 8 11 T H E O R Y A N D P R A C T I C E From theory to practice and back again This issue of Context highlights a number of recent academic research projects that have sought to engage with practice and policy. The idea came from IHBC director Seán O’Reilly’s attendance at Building on the Past, a workshop funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the project ‘Building on the Past, Constructing the Future: understanding intersections between energy and authenticity in the build environment’ (AH/L000032/1), co- ordinated by Tom Yarrow of DurhamUniversity. The workshop, bringing together a number of academics and heritage practitioners, acted as a microcosm of how academia and practice have been working together in the recent past. Rather than repeat the workshop verbatim, the issue looks across academic disciplines to consider some of the most recent research and how it is interacting with practice. The articles each reflect two main aims: first, to give examples of recent academic research that has been used in practice and, second, to bring some of the ideas from those academic research projects into wider dialogue with heritage practitioners. Rather than being seen as a linear form of theory directing practice, or practice directing theory, the articles try to show the dialogical nature of engagement between academia and practice. Contributors come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, archaeol- ogy, architecture, cultural geography and urban history. They include scholars from various conceptual and methodological approaches, and at various stages of their research. Some of the work is completed and published, while other projects are ongoing and continuing to inform research directions. Each article demonstrates the range of ways in which perspectives can be, and have been, drawn into productive dialogue with professionals, while recognising the complexity of this dialogical process. Generating knowledge that responds to spe- cific practical problems in the case of Henrik Schoenefeldt on the Houses of Parliament (page 15), or more critically challenging them in the case of Simon Gunn’s discussion of the role of urban historical approaches within urban conser- vation (page 18). In some instances the aim is to more profoundly question the assumptions that inform such interventions, as in Caitlin DeSilvey and David Mitchell’s conversation concerning the publication of Curated Decay (page 20) , the discussion by the Heritage Futures Teamon what constitutes a heritage future (page 22), andHarald Fredheim’s questioning of how volunteers fit into current and future conservation practice (page 25). Finally, Siân Jones and colleagues (page 28) and Andrew McClelland (page 32) provide examples of new methods, digital and non-digital, that have been used to elucidate the social significance of contested heritage sites and provide ways into understanding the different ways in which heritage sites matter to a range of different users. Running across the articles is an issue that remains as important in heritage theory as it does practice: that of how we manage change. The articles here suggest that we can curatedecay, conceptualise heritagefutures and include different voices in the management of change by changing our responses to risk. Tying these issues together is a recognition that heritage is in this sense a social process of elaborating the significance of the past with respect to the present and future, and that it relates to the imperative to question some of themorematerially essentialist and fixed understandings of howandwhy the pastmatters. Collectively the articles show how work in the arts, humanities and social sciences can help shed light on the dilemmas and difficulties that practitioners face, and on what academics can learn through engagements with practitioners. Tom Yarrow and Rebecca Madgin