The Volkswagen Stiftung’s Global Issues Convention (GIC) was held between November 19th and 21st, 2024 in Hannover, Germany. The convention focused on four key areas: mobility, cross cutting, heritage and pandemics. This year’s convention was attended by the Heritage as Placemaking team, as the VW Stiftung is a central stakeholder in HaP’s sponsoring structure.
The most engaging and invaluable experiences from the GIC were poster presentations, where each of the participating projects briefly presented their works, and workshops. As HaP research assistant Binita Magaiya reports, it was “a moment to catch up with other projects and their visions.” Magaiya also draws attention to the GIC’s success in bringing together academics from different yet related fields, an important collaborative process that facilitated learning and exchange of ideas. This was echoed by both Emiline Smith and Pooja Kalita, two of HaP’s post-doctoral research fellows.
On the second day of the convention, 20th November, Dr. Pooja Kalita, Prof. Sasanka Perera and Dr. Sabin Ninglekhu convened a workshop titled ‘Doing’ Gender and Memory: Towards an Understanding of Heritage as Placemaking in South Asia. This was part of the heritage theme and discussed key issues at the intersection of gender, memory and heritage. They raised questions about discrimination and violent persecution in ‘places of heritage’; the role of the state in appropriating memory and narratives related to heritage; and recovering ‘erased’ memories. The workshop was structured to be interactive and included opening presentations by the three conveners after which participants were invited to give their own insights and brainstorm for a collaborative publication. Following the morning session on 20th, Dr. Ninglekhu was part of a second workshop alongside other attendees, to address critical heritage studies within a transcultural framework.
On 21st November, the third day of the convention, Dr. Emiline Smith and Dr. Stefanie Lotter convened a workshop titled Reckoning with the Ruins of Scholarship and Practice: Material Culture is Made and Unmade. So is Scholarship. Are Ruins Potential Sites of Conservation and Convergence? Again, as part of the heritage theme, this workshop was “about undoing, dissolution and destruction of material culture and the knowledge creation processes that surround it.” The idea was to collectively deliberate and “makes sense of physical and intellectual ruins.” Later the same day, Dr. Kalita convened a second workshop titled, Decolonizing the Voices: ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. Here the participants thought through labels and categories that pervade research and knowledge production as well contemporary discourses on politics, discrimination and conflict.
Reflecting on the entire experience, Dr. Kalita writes, “[The GIC] gave me the scope of meeting so many fellow researchers based in different parts of the world, especially from the Global South. The two workshops that I conducted had a very good attendance and amazing insights from the participants. It was a moment of reckoning about the power dynamics of researchers based in the Global South and Global North.”
Dr. Smith also reflects a similar experience from the convention and notes that, “The organization was excellent, striking a good balance between opportunities to hear from others about projects, engaging in workshops to stimulate discussions around best practices, research topics, and methodological challenges (including ethics) and networking opportunities.”
HaP’s Poster Presentation. Photo courtesy of Emiline Smith.
Dr. Kalita’s workshop along with other participants.
Dr. Ninglekhu’s workshop along with other participants.