Pooja Kalita presented her paper Heritagization Vs History(s): Gender in the ‘Neo-Global’ Urban Heritage of Lumbini at the Global Urban History Conference.
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.
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
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 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.
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.
