The lecture will canvas the issues raised in the speaker’s recent book, Re-imagining Heritage Interpretation; Enchanting the Past-Future (Ashgate, 2014). One of the peculiar features of the so-called ‘heritage industry’ is the separation between art galleries, museums and cultural heritage as fields of knowledge production. The latter lags behind the museum/art gallery sector partly because of institutional borders and bureaucratic silos and yet all three make claims about protecting ‘things’ from the past for the present/future. All three sectors ‘do’ conservation, education, research and stage/perform the material for visitors. Interpretation of objects/places/monuments for visitors/tourists, while common across all heritage sites (whatever the definition), has at non-museum heritage sites been locked into an information/education/on-site learning paradigm for decades. A critique of this paradigm, particularly in the face of digital media, was the starting point for my book. The lecture will look at selected issues: interpretation as representation; heritage experiences beyond representation; digital futures and cross-cultural translation.
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch Lecture Theatre
Date: Wednesday 7 October 2020
Time: 6.15-7.15 pm
Russell Staiff holds a PhD in art history from the University of Melbourne where he was the foundation lecturer in the postgraduate visual arts and tourism program. He began his life in heritage and tourism as a tour guide in Italy. Currently, he is an adjunct fellow in the heritage and tourism program in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Sydney and an adjunct professorial fellow in the architectural heritage and tourism management program in the Faculty of Architecture at Silpakorn University, Bangkok. His research interests are two-fold: (1) the various intersections between cultural heritage, communities and tourism with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia and (2) heritage as a socio-cultural phenomenon. He is a member of the ICOMOS International Committee on Cultural Tourism.
Registration: http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/russellstaiff