The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Affect by Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque; Person, Angela M.;

Short description:

The Routledge International Handbook on Heritage and Affect brings together leading and emerging scholars, practitioners, designers, and artists to examine how heritage environments shape and are shaped by affect, emotion, embodiment, and power.

Long description:

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Affect brings together leading and emerging scholars, practitioners, designers, and artists to examine how heritage environments shape and are shaped by affect, emotion, embodiment, and power. Addressing museums, memorials, landscapes, and immersive heritage practices worldwide, the volume situates affect at the center of contemporary heritage theory, methods, and practice.

Organized in six thematic sections, this handbook bridges foundational debates with applied questions of heritage design, immersive media, architecture, and professional ethics. Across global case studies, the chapters show how places of heritage operate as designed atmospheres that move publics, configuring perception, memory, and political subjectivity, while also revealing how affective encounters can cultivate empathy, reproduce exclusion, or mobilize collective action. This volume integrates more-than-representational and contextual approaches to trace the motion of emotion across museums, memorials, archives, and landscapes. It also advances methodological innovation, from multisensory and multimodal ethnography to computational analysis and wearable biosensing, offering readers concrete tools for research and practice. Throughout, contributors foreground care, consent, accessibility, and justice, especially in sites of difficult heritage and cultural trauma, equipping readers to critically design, interpret, and steward heritage environments in a technologically accelerated and politically polarized world.

This handbook is for scholars and postgraduate students in heritage, museum and memory studies, cultural geography, anthropology, architecture, and digital and immersive humanities. It will also be valuable to curators, heritage professionals, exhibition designers, planners, artists, and educators seeking ethically grounded ways to understand, curate, and evaluate affective experience in museums, memorials, historic sites, and heritage landscapes.

"Rarely have I encountered a book as impressive as this one. Micieli-Voutsinas and Person have edited a volume that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of how heritage spaces create affective atmospheres and how these environments are designed, experienced, emotionally felt, and engaged with on political and ethical levels. ... More than just exploring a new direction in heritage studies, this volume redefines the field and aims to influence a new generation of scholars and practitioners, especially at a time when our relationship with the past is undergoing significant change and debate."  ~ Derek H. Alderman, Chancellor’s Professor of Human Geography at the University of Tennessee and Past President of the American Association of Geographers (2017-2018)

"This volume marks an important and timely turn in our understanding of landscapes of public memory and commemoration. Bringing together a breadth of remarkable scholars from across disciplines and continents, it bridges theory, method, and practice to highlight how museums, memorials, and immersive technologies shape public feeling and political life. This is an essential, forward-looking advance in our understanding of the dynamics of public memory." ~ Ken Foote, Professor and Director of Urban and Community Studies at the University of Connecticut and Past President of the American Association of Geographers (2010-2011)

"The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Affect sets a new agenda for the study of how imagined pasts are experienced today. By foregrounding affect, the volume connects different ways of understanding cultural heritage, highlights how it is felt through the senses, the body, and the place, and brings in diverse global and decolonial perspectives.  For scholars of memory studies, it offers both a valuable point of reference and a source of fresh conceptual insight into the role of affect in shaping practices of remembering." ~ Joanna Wawrzyniak, University Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw & Past President of the Memory Studies Association (2024-2025)

Table of Contents:

List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; INTRODUCTION; 1 .Introduction: Foundations and Frontiers for Heritage and Affect; 2. Decolonising Emotion and Affect: Taking ‘Other’ Knowledges Seriously at the Heritage Site; 3 Anger as an Affective Tool; 4  Ineffability in Critical Heritage; 5  Emerging Methods in Affect and Heritage Studies; 6  Frontiers in Trauma-Informed Heritage Research; 7  Using Computational Methods to Evaluate Affective Relevance at Historically Distant Heritage;  SECTION 1 Transformative Emotional Experiences at Museums, Memorials and Historic Sites --  8  Introduction: Transformative Emotional Experiences at Museums, Memorials and Historic Sites: The Affective Politics of Difficult Heritage; 9  Establishing Historical Significance in Wereldmuseum Amsterdam; 10 National Parks and Ambiguous Affect; 11    Decolonizing Heritage; 12  Undesired Emotion; 13    Meta-memorial; 14  The Embodied Emotionality of Repair; 15    Affective Regeneration at Kent State; 16 Curating Conflict-Related Sexual Violence; SECTION 2 Immersive Technologies, Affect, and Cultural Heritage -- 17  Introduction: Immersive Technologies, Affect, and Cultural Heritage; 18    Sounding a Politics of Immersion; 19    Augmented Reality at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; 20  Engaging Palestinian Youth in Their Heritage Through the Creation of a Virtual Reality Documentary; 21 Archive-Ruins; 22  Listening to Change; 23  Animating Affect; SECTION 3 Immersive Art and Design -- 24  Introduction: Immersive Art and Design; 25  Stepping into a Painting; 26  Curating the End of Love; 27  Designing Heritage Atmospheres; 28  Sounding Grainger; 29  Fostering Empathy through Augmented Reality; 30  Affective Heritage and Embodied Experiences through Design; 31  Public Geographies of Racial Segregation; SECTION 4 Embodiment, Affect, and Heritage Architecture -- 32  Introduction: Embodiment, Affect, and Heritage Architecture; 33  Learning about Affect in Heritage from Diverse Bodies and Minds;  34  Selective Permeability, Political Affordance, and the Atmospheric Qualities of Tahrir Square; 35  Children and Young People’s Embodied Experiences of Industrial Heritage;  36  Caring for Silence Heritages; 37   Reconvening Affective Sonic Pasts; 38   Touching Traces of the Past;  39   Architectural Proportion Beyond Beauty;  40  The Atmosphere of Ruins; SECTION 5 Affect in Practice: The Ethics of Deploying Affect --  41 Introduction: Affect in Practice: The Ethics of Deploying Affect; 42  Materializing Loss; 43   The Ethics of “Simple” Technologies; 44   “Crime Doesn’t Pay; 45   Ethics and Military Heritage; 46    “It Takes an Emotional Toll on All of Them:”; Index.