affect and emotion in heritage and museum studies

What is it about?

Affect and emotion, like memory before them, have recently become a focus of discussion in the social sciences. This chapter reviews the way emotion has been addressed in heritage studies: we argue that any engagement with affect and emotion needs to be based on a pragmatic approach, which starts from an understanding that emotions are not only culturally, historically, and socially mediated, but also have moral and political consequences and impacts. If we accept that heritage is a political resource used in claims for recognition and struggles against misrecognition, then understanding how the interplay between emotions and remembering are informed by people's culturally and socially diverse affective responses must become central in a politically informed critical heritage studies.

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Why is it important?

Summarises the history within heritage studies of the ways in which emotion and affect have been dealt with, and makes an argument for the adoption of Wetherell's idea of affective practice as a remedy for the overly abstract theorisation of emotion that has tended to dominate heritage studies debates.