Podcast Series

Connected to the book Border Straddling Heritages: Containment, Contestation and Appreciation of Shared Pasts, published by Berghahn Books 2025.

Rather than separating work on borders and heritage, the underlying assumption of the book and podcast series is that heritage and borders must be approached as mutually constitutive as heritage-border complexes. This provides the theoretical prompt for both the chapters of the book and the episodes of the Podcast series, each of which involves Ali and David in conversation with some of the contributors of the book.

The Podcast episodes speak between the specific contents of the Chapter being discussed, and the central concerns of the anthology as a whole, responding to questions: (e.g.) over the relationship between heritage, borders and boundaries; how elements of border straddling are negotiated and work on the ground; how these processes may be connected to soft power and/or lend themselves to constructive or ‘peace-full’ aspects of heritage relations (etc.). Each podcast provides an opportunity to speak to a particular interdisciplinary connection, between ‘heritage studies’ and (e.g.) anthropology, history, archaeology, geography (etc.), and will focus on grounded case studies throughout Asia and Europe, as well as in North America and Africa.