Heritage as Placemaking is inviting papers until 30th January, 2025 for their panel at ECSAS taking place between October 1st - 4th, 2025.
Dr. Pooja Kalita, a Research Fellow with the project 'Heritage as Placemaking' recently presented her paper 'What has Heritage got to do with it? Understanding the Built Environment of Bodh Gaya’s Foodscape' at the 9th International Conference on Food and Drink Studies, hosted by the IEHCA (European Institute for the History and Culture of Food
The team of Herne Katha, the Nepal-based film documentary project known for its telling of everyday stories in Nepal, is coming to the UK! Join us for a free event on May 4 at SOAS University of London, when the Herne Katha team will preview their newest film, “The Lost Years”, and answer questions from the audience.
Dr. Emiline Smith presents at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference 2023 (Melbourne). The paper, which summarizes her fieldwork findings from the past year, is titled “The True Cost of Yartsa Gunbhu: Crime and Justice Surrounding the World's Most Valuable Parasite.”
Dr. Emiline Smith and her research assistant, Zinpa Gyaltsen Budha, attended and presented at the Asian Criminology Conference in Ratmalana, Sri Lanka. They presented a paper together on best practices for joint fieldwork, reflecting on their collaboration in the Dolpa region, while Dr. Smith also presented a paper on her ongoing research on the theft of cultural heritage.
Dr. Monalisa Maharjan presented two papers at the 2023 ICOMOS General Assembly and Scientific Symposium in Sydney, Australia (31st August–9th September). Her first paper, “When cities become modern: ICH in Urban Space Vs Modernization in context of Kathmandu Valley,” responded to the panel Expressing Diversity: Intangible Cultural Heritage in Urban Public Spaces. Her second talk, “Heritage Activism for the Commons: Agents, Possibilities and End Goals,” contributed to the panel Indigenous Heritage.
HaP post-doctoral researcher Monalisa Maharjan presented her paper “Constructing identity with the Chariot of Karunamaya. A case of Barahi Guthi from Patan (Nepal).” Her work, which examined aspects of placemaking in carpentry work necessary for the creation and maintenance of the Chariot of Karunamaya, was based on her recent fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley.
On July 28, Christiane Brosius presented her work on placemaking and its infrastructures in the Kathmandu Valley as part of the ECSA2023 conference in Turin. The talk was part of a panel, 10 – Stasis and Motion in the Processional Culture of Kathmandu Valley: The Buṅgadyaḥ Yātrā Revisited, which was also convened by Christiane Brosius, alongside Manik Bajracharya and Rajan Khatiwoda.
On Friday, July 28th, Monica Mottin presented a paper at ECSAS 2023 in Turin. The paper, “The revival of Jhijhiya dance in Janakpur, Nepal,” demonstrated some of her findings from recent fieldwork in Janakpur. Her talk was part of Panel 47, Recent Cultural Heritage Initiatives in Nepal and the Himalayas, convened by Verena Widorn, Nina Mirnig, and Robin Coningham.
Binita Magaiya and Stefanie Lotter presented at the Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal & The Himalaya (26–28 July 2023), hosted at Social Science Baha, Kathmandu. Their presentation, which focused on their recent research at the sites of Mukundapur and Muchuck, formed part of Panel A8: “Identity and Community Formation through Discourse.” The panel was chaired by Kumud Rana, with Sanjay Sharma as the discussant.
HaP researcher Binita Magaiya presented a paper at the 2023 World Congress of Architects, which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her paper examined various levels of community involvement in the reconstruction process of the iconic monument of Kasthamandap, which was destroyed in the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal.
This panel, part of the conference SIEF2023 (Société Internationale d´Ethnologie et de Folklore), is co-convened by Dr. Monica Mottin and Dr. Barbara Curda (UCA (université Clermont Auvergne), France, IFP (Institut Français de Pondichéry), India). The panel asks, “In times of crisis, documenting performance-based cultural heritage is crucial to foster individuals’ and communities’ sense of belonging and resilience. How is heritage performance documentation culturally and socially situated? For whom do we document and how?”
Dr. Monica Mottin presents her latest research as part of her panel Documenting performance-based heritage in times of crisis (SIEF2023). Her talk “aims to raise questions about the position and role of researchers and ethnographic research methods in documenting heritage performance, particularly in relation to communities, event organisers and new forms of media and documentation.”
Dr. Monalisa Maharjan presents her work on the Hiti water systems, part of her research for the Heritage as Placemaking project.
Dr. Pooja Kalita has presented her work on heritage infrastructures of Bodh Gaya as part of the Annual GAPS (Gesellschaft für anglophone postkoloniale Studien) Conference, which took place at the University of Konstanz from May 17–20, 2023. Her paper, “The infrastructure of 'Heritage': The Global, National and Local in Bodh Gaya,” presented her observations after six weeks of fieldwork in Bodh Gaya.
On May 16, 2023, Dr. Monica Mottin gave a guest lecture titled "Researching Theater and Social Change in Nepal." The event was jointly organized by the Department of Anthropology Tri-Chandra Multiple Campus in Ghantaghar, Kathmandu and the Tri-Chandra Anthropological Society.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention, the UNESCO New Delhi Multisectoral Regional Office, jointly with the State Government of Madhya Pradesh of India, organized a Sub-Regional Conference on World Heritage: “The Next 50: Ways Forward for South Asia World Heritage” on 17–18 April in Bhopal, Madya Pradesh, India. Binita Magaiya was invited to present her work on Kasthamandap as part of the theme “World Heritage and Sustainable Development for Local Community.”
On 31st March, at South Asian University (Sociology Classroom 006, ES Building) from 2:00 pm–4:00 pm, Heritage as Placemaking post-doctoral researcher Dr. Emiline Smith (Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow) will give a presentation that traces the pathway of trafficked Asian cultural objects over the last 50 years. Please see the accompanying poster for the full abstract and further details.
On January 25, 2023, Dr. Monica Mottin led a workshop on theater in Nepal for MA Applied Theater students of Mountview College, London. The presentation highlighted her research on community and folk theater in Janakpur and Patan, Nepal, with an emphasis on the Kartik Naach.
HaP Researchers Binita Magaiya, Dr. Monalisa Maharjan, and Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu each presented their work as part of the seminar Community Resilience - A Reflection on 2015 Earthquake, an event in Kathmandu organized by Queen’s University Belfast, The British Academy, and the Royal Institute of British Architects.
On December 11, 2022, Heritage as Placemaking team members Dr. Monalisa Maharjan, Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu, and Binita Magaiya participated in a discussion hosted by the initiative Folk Lok as part of their initiative Dāphā Calling, an annual forum for the sharing of knowledge and practice on the Kathmandu Valley's historic Dāphā music tradition. The seminar presented the team’s experiences from the Heritage as Placemaking Summer School 2022.
On December October 21, 2022, Dr. Monalisa Maharjan presented a paper prepared by her and Dr. Stefanie Lotter for the conference Ethnographies of Urban Data and Technology, hosted by the IT University and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The presentation explored the Alko Hiti water well in Patan, Kathmandu Valley, to ask how attempts to preserve the ancient heritage of water conduits intersect with local neighborhood governance and new forms of heritage activism.
Baakhan Nyane Waa presents its second episode of our Nostalgia Series, to hear the stories of the indigenous community of the Kirati. Our storyteller, Prof. Dr. Martin Gaenszle, will be answering questions in this storytelling session. (Organized by Baakhan Nyane Waa, conducted in collaboration with the Heritage as Placemaking Summer School 2022)
Two members of the HaP research team, Monica Mottin and Stefanie Lotter, co-convened a panel at the EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) Belfast 2022 Conference. Their panel, titled Alter-heritage: Imagining South Asian heritage from the margins, aimed to explore forms of erasure of subaltern heritage and whether/how solidarities and commoning may facilitate the repositioning of heritage to question dominant historiography. The panel saw six papers presented from Katja Mueller, Katja Mielke and Helena Cermeño, Cameron Warner, Sasi Kumar, Shobhit Shakya, Ulrik Hoj Johnson. Dr. Lotter and Dr. Mottin now plan on producing an edited special journal issue with the topic of alterity in focus.
Multiple researchers on the Heritage as Placemaking team co-organized a panel at the Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya (27–29 July 2022). The panel took into account myriad and multifarious functions, uses, and values of heritage that are put to work for the purposes of governance, self-governance, sense of place, community as well as urban planning. These politics and practices are relationally co-constituted in the production of place, space and subjectivities with regressive and progressive possibilities. To this end, the papers in this proposed panel together document and examine the role of heritage in forming cleavages of divisiveness and difference on the one hand, and the possibilities for solidarity and commoning, on the other.
