Member Spotlight highlights the work of our members

Member Spotlight, April 2023

Dr. Pınar Aykaç

Tell us about yourself and your work: I am an assistant professor in the Graduate Programme in Conservation of Cultural Heritage at Middle East Technical University, Ankara/Turkey. This makes me part of a multi-disciplinary research environment, where I consistently contribute with my knowledge and expertise in theoretical and practical approaches to heritage conservation.

I hold a PhD from UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture and I was previously a Weinberg fellow in architectural history and preservation in the Italian Academy at Columbia University. My research, teaching and practice is at the intersection of the fields of heritage studies, architectural history, museum studies, architectural design, and urban planning. My research interests include the relationship between heritage sites and museums, heritage politics and contestations, and the interpretation and presentation of heritage places. It focuses mainly on how the past infiltrates the present day in a genuinely interdisciplinary fashion through heritage-making, urban regeneration, and cultural policies. My empirically grounded approach concentrates on the selective appropriation and rejection of the past and embraces the presence of multiple actors in the remaking of heritage in different contexts. I particularly highlight the political currency of cultural heritage by unpacking how neo-Ottomanism as a state policy has found its reflections in heritage-making, which prioritise Ottoman heritage—specifically for its Islamic and imperial associations—over diverse and multi-layered heritage of Turkey and the former territories of the Ottoman Empire like the Balkans and MENA Countries.

My monograph Sultanahmet, Istanbul's Historic Peninsula: Musealization and Urban Conservation reframes musealisation as a process of curation with wider ideological, political, and social motives that encompasses entire sets of practices, institutions, and ideologies of appropriating the past. My post-doctoral project Contesting the Byzantine Past: Four Hagia Sophias as Ideological Battlegrounds of Architectural Conservation in Turkey, discussed the recent conversions into mosques as the manifestation of neo-Ottomanism and rising Islam in Turkey. I am currently on the editorial board of the METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, and I recently become one of the co-editors of Heritage & Society Journal.

My practice in heritage conservation ranges from individual heritage sites to cultural landscapes and museums such as the Presidential Ataturk Museum Pavilion Conservation Project, Commagene Nemrut World Heritage Site Management Plan Project, and the Promotion of the Syriac Intangible Heritage in Mardin Region Project.

I consider myself as an advocate of people-centred and human-rights approaches to heritage studies both in academia and practice in Turkey and around the world. I am a member of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, ICOMOS and the working group of ‘Contested Histories and Heritage Places’, Society of Architectural Historians, DOCOMOMO Turkey and an executive committee member of the Conservation and Restoration Specialists Association in Turkey, which is an NGO working to foster collaboration between international and national actors on heritage conservation and community engagement.

What does being an ACHS member mean to you?:

We are at a time when heritage is seen as a present-centred and future-oriented phenomenon, continuously remade through the interaction of different agents and agencies, human - nonhuman, tangible - intangible, local - global, natural - cultural, etc. Current scholarship mainly concentrates on the relevance of heritage for the society at present and how it can be an instrument that can trigger change for the current issues of social, racial, economic, gender, and climate injustice and inequalities.

The Association for Critical Heritage Studies has been a growing network of scholars who critically engage with the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical considerations of heritage that will dominate the field of heritage studies in the near future. It is a network of scholars from various backgrounds and regions that contribute to the transdisciplinary character of heritage studies, which is at the cross-section of many disciplines, simultaneously informing them and by being informed by them.

I became a member of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies in 2019 and I attended the ACHS 2020 Futures Virtual conference. The conference was a clear manifestation of how transnational studies, gender and race studies, postcolonial theory, post-Anthropocentric and post humanist standpoints have found their reflections in heritage and museum studies, and therefore the field has begun to expand using the methodologies borrowed from other disciplines. Therefore, the ACHS has become an important platform that triggers critical engagement with these disciplines meaningfully rather than superficially by encouraging collaboration. More importantly, it is an international platform that puts communities both (human and non-human actors and their interactions) in the centre of heritage studies to highlight the relevance of heritage for the society at present.

By being a member of the ACHS from Turkey, I contribute to the studies that see heritage as a driver of transformation for embedded injustices both in academia and in practice by recognising the roles of various agents, agencies, and processes through co-creative practices and moving beyond the Euro-centric approaches.

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