The 2021 Community Archives & Heritage Group online conference will focus on "Communities, sustainable environments and heritage". It will feature different presentations on how community archives and heritage work can engage with critical questions of the environment and sustainability.Even in the context of the current pandemic, the local and global challenges facing the environment and a sustainable future, including the impact of climate change, changes in the use of land and city spaces, rising sea levels and changing climate patterns, displacement of people, and the scarcity of resources are ones which face all communities. Lives of communities are bound up absolutely and indivisibly with the environment in which those lives are led and heritage can play an important role in understanding these changes, engaging with the past to inform the present and the future and supporting communities to find solutions to these challenges.
Taking the environment and heritage in the broadest sense as pertaining to all the places and spaces in which communities live, work and play, this includes urban and rural, contemporary and historical and the built as well as the natural environment. We would like to hear from groups whose work reflects on their environment in past and present and offers possibilities for sustainable futures.
Suggested topics for conference presentations include (but are not exclusive to):
- Heritage & local environment (place)
- Community heritage, climate change and sustainable futures
- Food heritage & the environment – including development of slow food networks and sustainable living
- Countryside and change
- Environmental activism
- Historic urban environments
- Urban change and regeneration
- Heritage activities and sustainable energy use
Please send in short abstracts / suggestions (200 words) for papers (20-30 minutes) plus brief biographical details to Andrew Flinn (a.flinn@ucl.ac.uk) by July 9th. This online conference will take place in late September / early October and successful paper givers will be contacted by the end of July.
More info at: https://www.communityarchives.org.uk/content/category/conference/2021-conference