Future Stories in the Global Heritage Industry

by Alia Yunis (editor), Robert Parthesius (editor), NiccolòAcram Cappelletto (editor)

Future Stories in the Global Heritage Industry explores what happens to the heritage and memory of communities that find themselves in contact with the rest of the world when they become UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Written by an interdisciplinary group of emerging scholars and heritage professionals connected to these sites through their own heritage, this volume considers how a community can engage with a site’s globalized importance while retaining its own sense of history. Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic methods, film, interviews, and archival research, the book adds to the discourse around Critical Heritage Studies. It does so by putting theories into practice in selected heritage sites in Romania, the UAE/India, Eritrea, China, Mozambique, Tanzania and Malaysia. The book also contributes towards the dismantlement of the many dichotomies imposed on heritage from the divisions between natural and cultural, or tangible and intangible in the UNESCO Conventions and Eurocentric heritage practices. Looking towards the future of the past, the volume asks whether heritage can be objectively or equitably managed, as it increasingly comes into conflict with issues around nation-building, climate change, social class, ethnicity, religion and gender.

Future Stories in the Global Heritage Industry will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, sociology, public history, history, international studies, sociology and anthropology.

194 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2024

About the author

Born in Chicago, ALIA YUNIS is a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow. She has worked as a journalist and filmmaker in several countries. As the daughter of an environmental engineer and a UN diplomat, she grew up in the Midwest, particularly the Twin Cities, and in Beirut during the civil war, graduating from high school in Athens, Greece. She completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Minnesota and American University in Washington, DC. Her fiction has been published in several anthologies. She teaches film and television at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi.