Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene

edited by Rodney Harrison and Colin Sterling

Understanding how pasts resource presents is a fundamental first step towards building alternative futures in the Anthropocene. This collection brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore concepts of care, vulnerability, time, extinction, loss and inheritance across more-than-human worlds, connecting contemporary developments in the posthumanities with the field of critical heritage studies. Drawing on contributions from archaeology, anthropology, critical heritage studies, gender studies, geography, histories of science, media studies, philosophy, and science and technology studies, the book aims to place concepts of heritage at the centre of discussions of the Anthropocene and its associated climate and extinction crises – not as a nostalgic longing for how things were, but as a means of expanding collective imaginations and thinking critically and speculatively about the future and its alternatives. Contributors: Christina Fredengren, Cecilia Åsberg, Anna Bohlin, Adrian Van Allen, Esther Breithoff, Rodney Harrison, Colin Sterling, Joanna Zylinska, Denis Byrne, J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, Caitlin DeSilvey, Anatolijs Venovcevs, Anna Storm and Claire Colebrook.

“Deterritorializing The Future is without doubt a major contribution to Critical Heritage Studies, and also has significant resonances beyond this emerging field. Anyone concerned with the art of living in ecologically precarious times, anyone who cares about the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman and their planetary legacies needs to read this book.”
Ben Dibley, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

Editor Bios

Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow (2017-2020). He has experience working in, teaching and researching natural and cultural heritage conservation, management and preservation in the UK, Europe, Australia, North America and South America. He is the (co) author or (co) editor of 17 books and guest edited journal volumes and over 80 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters and is the founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. Between 2015 and 2019 he was principal investigator on the AHRC funded Heritage Futures research programme www.heritage-futures.org. His research has been funded by AHRC, GCRF/UKRI, British Academy, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the European Commission.

Colin Sterling is an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellow at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. His research investigates the ideas and practices of heritage from a range of theoretical and historical perspectives, with a core focus on critical-creative approaches to heritage making. He is currently writing a book with Rodney Harrison on more-than-human heritage in the Anthropocene, which aims to expand the framework of critical heritage studies to better address the urgent problems of a warming world. Colin was previously a Project Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and has worked as a heritage consultant internationally, specializing in curatorial planning, audience research and interpretation. His first monograph Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past was published by Routledge in 2019. He has a long-standing interest in the relationship between art and heritage, and is currently working on a new project investigating the impact of experiential and immersive design across the heritage sector.