David Harvey presenting the project proposal at the Pilot Research Review KNCU Conference 2024
This project is supported by the Transnational Heritage Joint Research Grants, funded by the Korea Heritage Service of the Republic of Korea and operated by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, as part of the "Unveiling Shared Pasts. Shaping Common Futures" International Joint Research Grants on Transnational Heritage programme.
Grant Total Amount: 375,000,000 KRW (USD 258,600).
The project explores the dynamic intersections of heritage, borders, and diaspora, focusing on their roles in shaping geopolitical and cultural landscapes within Eurasian contact zones. Building on the findings of a Pilot study, it employs the concept of Heritage-Border Complexes (HBCs) as an analytical framework to examine how heritage and borders are co-constituted through processes of state strategy, cultural narrative-building, territorial claims, and situated responses. The study is divided into three work packages (WPs) that investigate specific case studies related to geopolitical dynamics, transnational heritage management, and diasporic cultural diplomacy.
The project aims to impact policy by providing insights for UNESCO and other international bodies, offering strategies for cooperative transnational heritage management. Educational outputs include a series of lectures and training programmes for interns, while public outreach will be facilitated through digital platforms, interactive exhibits, and public lectures. Capacity building will involve proposed partnerships with institutions like KNCU and the Centre for Transnational Studies (Southampton, UK), promoting long-term collaboration and sustainable heritage management.
David Harvey is an Associate Professor in Critical Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. His work has focussed on the geographies of heritage and he has contributed to debates over processual understandings of heritage, heritage-landscape and heritage-climate change relations, as well as work on remembrance, on oral history and farming practice. With colleagues, he is presently developing work on ‘heritage-border complexes’, ‘peaceful/pacific heritage’ and ‘island living’. Recent work includes Creating Heritage: Unrecognised Pasts and Rejected Futures (edited with Tom Carter, Roy Jones and Iain Robertson, 2020) and The Real Agricultural Revolution: the Transformation of English Farming, 1939-1985 (with Paul Brassley, Matt Lobley and Mike Winter), which won the Thirsk Memorial Prize (2022) for Agricultural History Book of the Year.
Ali Mozaffari, PhD, is a Senior Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute and a former Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow at, Deakin University, Australia. His current research interests include geopolitics of the past as well as culture and the built environment with a specific focus on West Asia. His publications include Heritage Movements in Asia: Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity (edited volume with Tod Jones, Berghahn 2020), Development, architecture and the formation of heritage in late-twentieth century Iran: A vital past (Manchester University Press 2020), World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae (Routledge 2016), and Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place (IB Tauris 2014). Mozaffari is the founding co-editor of Berghahn’s series Explorations in Heritage Studies and co-founder of the Heritage and Transnationalism Network (HTN) with the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.
Email: heritageinwestasia@gmail.com
Dr Rishika Mukhopadhyay is a lecturer in Development Geographies at the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Southampton, UK. Her work spans across two broad research strands; a. meaning, production and politics of living heritage including craft based livelihoods, sensory aspects, sacred sites intersecting with the urban development of southern cities b. community-based economies in postindustrial and postcolonial contexts. She has co-curated two arts-based public engagement exhibitions as part of her research practice. Previously she held positions at University of Exeter and University of Durham. She is currently working on two projects on transnational diasporic heritage in sacred spaces funded by British Academy and Korean National Commission UNESCO and Cultural Heritage Administration. She is a member of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies and Royal Geographical Society with IBG.
She can be reached by email at r.mukhopadhyay@soton.ac.uk.
Madiha studies Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University, India, with research interests in cultural studies, spatiality, critical theory, and questions of identity. She has held research roles at the University of Southampton and the University of Pennsylvania, and was more recently an Ashoka Media Studies Departmental Fellow (2025). Here she worked on ethnographies of transnational Kashmiri diaspora digital networks as modes of world-making in- and against a borderland. She is eager to continue in the space of critical epistemologies, pedagogies, and contested subjectivities in varied social and political contexts.
Siqing Yang is a second-year MA student in Sustainable Heritage Management and a current intern at the HBC Project. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Tourism Studies and previously worked at the First Emperor Mausoleum Museum. His current research focuses on civilizational rhetoric and practices in Central Asian geopolitics. During his internship, he is responsible for data analysis and updating the HBC website.
Miriam got her BA in Archaeology from Aarhus University, where she is now getting an MA in Sustainable Heritage Management. Her interests lie in cultural entanglement, postcolonial heritage-making and contested heritage. She is also very interested in the origins and parallels in musical folklore worldwide. For her internship with the HBC project, she is working on the website and on WP2 with the Moravian Settlements transnational WHS as well as WP3 on Indian diaspora.