What Stayed: Some Reflective Notes from the ACHS ECRN Symposium 2025
Imamur Hossain
‘Contested Heritage as Shared Responsibility’. That was the title we, the coordination team of the ACHS Early Career Researchers Network, finally landed on for the 2025 symposium. But arriving at those words was not a straight line. It required weeks of back-and-forth, trading themes and titles across different continents that we have been collectively working from.
Looking back, the conversation was one of those exchanges where everyone is generous, but the differences matter. The ECRN is steered by a small coordinating team scattered across continents, and this physical distance only intensified the care with which we worked through questions of meaning. I thought about the title 'Heritage in Flux' because 'flux' somewhat captured the uncertainty I felt. Back in 2024 in Bangladesh, I had witnessed the fragile, high-velocity atmosphere of an anti-authoritarian revolution that eventually altered the public meaning of monuments, places and cultural objects. Meanwhile, in South Korea, my fieldwork was surreally unfolding in parallel, as I sat with the slow-motion collapse of inherited interpretations at remote living heritage churches. While one context was shaped by sudden political upheaval, the other was by steady population decline, and together they carried the risk of irreversible cultural evaporation. Desmond, our colleague working at Nottingham University, proposed ‘Heritage Justice III’. This was a brilliant nod to the legacy that ECRN was collectively building through hosting the symposium. It was also a way to honour the fact that the dialogue was part of a much longer story. Ran, based at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzen, was worried about her VPN dropping while we brainstormed in Google Docs, but she asked a question no one else had: can we really keep numbering these forever? And Yelyzaveta, writing from Newcastle where she's doing her PhD and shouldering much of the unseen labour of this symposium, found a way to weave all our ideas together, merging the legacy and the uncertainty into ‘Heritage Justice in Flux’.
Curiously, none of those early titles endured. The final one emerged through gradual erosion of every option that fell short. Weeks later, after sifting through fifty-nine submissions, we found ourselves inevitably colour coding a sprawling spreadsheet. Shuffling abstracts between emerging themes felt like moving furniture in a house that is still under construction. At last, the title clicked into place. The symposium was never just about contestation; it was about what comes after.
Each submission demanded careful thematic placement beside careful reviewing. It was not ranking, but situating based on what it demanded, and somehow that felt even trickier. I remember we puzzled over a paper about a luxury resort built on an island that had been a former concentration camp. Should that be 'conflict heritage' or 'rethinking'? And there was another article on a former psychiatric asylum being reclaimed across generations; one of us typed ‘rethinking’, someone else typed ‘ICH’, and it ended up under ‘creative and cultural practices’. With every colour code we assigned, we made a subtle interpretive leap we could never quite justify. There was a certain irony in heritage researchers sorting heritage scholarship, just like the way institutions sort cultural objects, defining meaning by deciding where things belong.
In a moment of full-circle irony, my own work was also in the pile for evaluation. I submitted a paper that echoed the very questions I had been wrestling with during my UNESCO fellowship in Korea that time. Can we decolonise architectural heritage documentation by threading community memories into systems that have long privileged mostly the physical fabric while quietly sidelining lived meanings? I was drawn to the tension between the seemingly ‘sterile’ act of material documentation and the vibrancy of living memory, and to the question of whether these two worlds could coexist without one erasing the other. The thought of what happens to a heritage site when the people whose attachments and narratives make it meaningful are aging and thinning out somewhat haunted me. This tension is what I kept coming back to as I tried to build a protocol for integrating 'spatial narratives' into how heritage sites are interpreted and presented. Korea's depopulating rural churches became my testing ground. The buildings themselves were pristine. But inside, only a handful of elderly parishioners remained. And outside, the plaques spoke only of stone and timber. No one was telling the stories of the people who had made those spaces alive. I am still not sure the heritage discipline has a word for that kind of loss. A procedure for it felt even further away. Which is partly why I stepped back from assessing my own submission. It felt right to let my other colleagues in the coordination team decide its fate. After all, you cannot be both the curator and the exhibit at the same time.
Finally we settled on a date in early December with three whirlwind days packed with eight panels and thirty-six presentations in total. All spanning fourteen time zones. And I was far from home, still wrestling with jet lag and the challenge of syncing my body clock to a new rhythm after I moved to South Korea. I was serving as a fellow at UNESCO's World Heritage Interpretation and Presentation Centre (WHIPIC), where my days were split between crafting protocols for inclusive interpretation and diving into WHIPIC’s ongoing research. The field has long championed the idea of listening before speaking but rarely asks what comes after the listening ends. That is where my research found its purpose. Each morning, I puzzled over whether a community’s memory could survive the leap into a digital model without being reduced to mere exhibits. By afternoon, I was in meetings where the phrase 'outstanding universal value' kept coming up, a term that seems obvious until you ask, universal for whom? And who gets to be uncomfortable when the answer is not everyone?
So there I was, in one browser tab attending coordination meetings for a symposium where early career researchers were pushing against the limits of exactly those frameworks, and in another window drafting interpretation guidelines that operate within them. I did not experience this as a contradiction. It felt like the essence of heritage work itself, always straddling the line, both participant and critic, and always a little entangled in the systems you hope to transform. If that feels uneasy, it is meant to.
I keep circling back to a moment from the ‘Science, Technology, and Society’ panel I chaired on Day Two. Four papers, each offered a window into a different world. Julia spoke about school buildings in Japan that were left standing after the 2011 earthquake. She posed a haunting question about them, when does memorialisation cross into containment? And by officially preserving grief, do we quietly set its boundaries? Sreelakshmi explored Indian railway heritage and gave voice to something I have also been grappling with, that sometimes, when you are preserving the ‘physical’, you are also somewhat erasing the human. The site in Darjeeling still stands, but the memory of the labourers who built it has faded. We see this pattern keeps resurfacing in the post-colonial Global South. The structures endure, but the underlying stories grow thin with time! Sofia's paper was harder to sit with. She got into the history of leprosy, and what struck me was how the pandemic story we've been taught to tell is almost entirely about the cure. The triumph. But she kept pulling us back to what that triumph required, who was isolated, marked, confined. We don't usually linger there. Then there was Simona, who transformed the conversation by bringing sixty young Italian practitioners into the fold. This was not just scholars theorising policy, but people sitting together to draft legislation, side by side.
What I was trying to do was not simply watch the panel from the sidelines but framing the discussion, guiding the rhythm, and deciding which questions to prioritise. I think chairing sessions carries a certain level of authorship. But what I could not author was the moment when a presenter paused mid-sentence because a question from the audience unsettled something in their own argument. You could see them thinking through it in real time. That unscripted and slightly uncomfortable pause stayed with me. And for me, that is where scholarship feels most alive. Not in certainty, but in the moment someone realises they are still working something out.
During our early planning stages, Desmond put a comment into the margin of the shared Google doc. When someone suggested the theme ‘global south heritage methodologies’, he responded with gentle a precision. ‘May I propose to widen it to Global East and Global South’? Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, none of them probably fit easily under ‘Global South’, yet coloniality shapes them all. It was the kind of intervention that does not announce itself. Instead, it quietly shifted our perspective, and the conversation that followed grew broader and became more inclusive.
I think the symposium worked like that at its best. Not through revelations but recalibrations. Titles shifted, we colour-coded spreadsheets together, traded questions in chat boxes on Zoom and Microsoft Teams that probably lingered with presenters long after the sessions ended. These are small acts. But to me, this is what shared responsibility actually looks like when it moves from theory into action. Slow, collective, unfinished, and always a little uncertain. The conversations that emerged from the symposium about a possible roundtable, publications, and what this network becomes next are still open. I honestly can not predict where they will lead. But for three days in December, sitting at my desk in Sejong, while listening to researchers agree, disagree, hesitate, and rethink, I felt what the title promised. Not a tidy resolution, but a living sense of responsibility. Shared, debated, and always in motion.
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my ECRN colleagues - Desmond, Ran, and Yelyzaveta, for their generous input and for helping me sharpen the ideas presented in this post.