Papers by Luke James
Expertise and the making of World Heritage policy
International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2017
This paper contributes to two emergent areas of scholarship: first, the role of expertise within ... more This paper contributes to two emergent areas of scholarship: first, the role of expertise within the domain of cultural heritage practice; and second, international heritage institutions and their processes of governance. It does so by exploring expertise within the context of World Heritage Committee meetings. These forums of international heritage policy formulation have undergone significant changes in recent years, with larger geopolitical forces increasingly shaping process and decisions. This paper foregrounds the idea of these annual meetings as ‘locales’ in order to explore the inflows of expertise that help constitute authoritative decision-making, how expert knowledge is crafted for and by bureaucratic structure, and how the interplay between technical knowledge and politics via an ‘aesthetics of expertise’ bears upon future directions. In offering such an analysis, the paper seeks to add nuance and conceptual depth to our understanding of international conservation policy and the regulatory, governmental practices of organisations such as UNESCO.
Historic Environment, 2017
This paper considers how an important instrument of global heritage governance, the World Heritag... more This paper considers how an important instrument of global heritage governance, the World Heritage Convention, became just that—globalised and governing—through an analysis of a material artefact: the UNESCO World Heritage map. The map names only those States Parties that have signed the Convention. Thus, like other ordering technologies such as lists and registers, the map introduces yet another scheme of classification through which global heritage governance is effected. With only four states missing, it now also uncannily resembles an ordinary map of the world. UNESCO represents this near-universal membership of the Convention as a triumph. Scrutiny of the map's absences, however, evokes more ambivalent precedents: of states' maps that deliberately omit other states they do not recognise, or the spaces in colonial cartography left provisionally blank for territory yet to be acquired. By foregrounding a topographic rather than political representation of the world, the map suggests the possibility of alternative configurations of global heritage, yet ultimately reproduces the notion of coherent nation-states bounded by borders. The World Heritage map thus allows us to explore the tension between the practical logic that drives agents of heritage globalisation, and the geopolitical and historical specificities of states and regions.
Historic Environment, 2017
This special issue of Historic Environment emerged from a symposium by and for emerging heritage ... more This special issue of Historic Environment emerged from a symposium by and for emerging heritage researchers at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne, in November 2016. The objective of the symposium was to explore the intersections between heritage, sustainability and social justice. In the realm of heritage conservation, conflict and its aftermath, the rapidly growing tourism industry, the need to accommodate human and cultural rights, and changing global institutional practices and standards are among factors that result in complex situations that challenge disciplinary and professional boundaries. The papers in this issue illustrate this complexity and explore ways in which the links between heritage, social justice and sustainability can present productive synergies. They cover cases in Iraq, Iran and Myanmar as well as aspects of the World Heritage programme of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the broader international legal framework.
The symbolic value of expertise in international heritage diplomacy
Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, 2016
Taking the practices of expertise in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee process as its case stud... more Taking the practices of expertise in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee process as its case study, and contrasting this with field-based preservation practices, this article discusses the work of technical preservation experts away from the preservation object, to focus in the role of expertise in governance in international heritage institutions. It considers the status of expertise in historic preservation, and the diplomacy implicit in world heritage policy and decision making processes. Using the typologies of materiality and bureaucracy to assess the symbolic role and value of expertise, it shows how heritage expertise comes to inform practices of heritage diplomacy.
Conference Presentations by Luke James
IIAS conference: Heritage as aid and diplomacy, 2016
At a time of pressing and unprecedented challenges to global heritage conservation and cultural a... more At a time of pressing and unprecedented challenges to global heritage conservation and cultural and environmental governance more broadly, scepticism about claims to expertise have emanated from both vested economic and political interests and independent voices alike. Without a clear professional status, the weight given to technical advice in cultural heritage conservation is fraught and increasingly open to contest. This is particularly the case with the growing presence of emerging economic and political powers of the global South, particularly in Asia, which are openly challenging views perceived as smuggling an unstated Eurocentric intellectual agenda. Yet little clear basis has emerged to assist in distinguishing between a constructive, corrective critique of expertise, and attempts at its cynical, opportunistic dismantling for instrumental political, diplomatic and economic gain. A possible avenue forward is for closer ethnographic study of how both heritage conservation experts and political and diplomatic decision‐makers practise their roles to add empirical flesh to the polite normative platitudes of multilateral heritage practice.
Based on in‐depth interviews with experts and diplomatic decision‐makers working in the World Heritage system, this paper challenges the dominant view that technical expertise has been rendered subservient to politicised decision‐making at the annual World Heritage Committee meetings. Using Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and drawing on emerging case studies from Asia and the Pacific, this paper traces the construction and circulation of expert knowledge in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage system, finding expertise and technical experts present in unexpected places, both in the negotiated deal making and diplomatic dimensions of World Heritage.
Fearing loss - saving face: A case study of Australia’s resistance to World Heritage In Danger Listings
Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Hangzhou, China, 2018
Competitive internationalism sets the scene for winners and losers. As international lists and ra... more Competitive internationalism sets the scene for winners and losers. As international lists and rankings enable the possibility to rise and fall, ‘fear of loss’ becomes part and parcel of taking part. Within the field of heritage, the World Heritage List and its counterpart, the List of World Heritage in Danger (the ‘In Danger List’), figure as the most prominent examples of competitive lists. Whilst not intended to be a sanction on States, the In Danger List has nonetheless gained negative connotations from certain States over the years. For these states, the In Danger List represents the counterpoint to the World Heritage List’s ability to generate national prestige and, ultimately, contribute to international status gains. In this paper we draw on the concepts of ‘losing face’ and ‘reputational damage’ to explore how the In Danger List’s association with fall and loss play out through the case of Australia. As a prominent player within the World Heritage regime, Australia is a particularly interesting case. In parallel to its active role in foregrounding World Heritage listing as a tool for conservation, Australia has also entered into long and contentious fights against In Danger Listings proposed for its World Heritage sites Kakadu (in the 1990s) and the Great Barrier Reef (2010-2015). While these sites have been subject to threats from resource extraction and associated development, the Australian Government has gone to great lengths to avoid In Danger Listings which, arguably, could have strengthened their conservation efforts. The aim in this paper is to approach the phenomenon of competitive internationalism, fear and loss and reputational damage, by addressing the following questions: what has motived Australia’s resistance to In Danger Listings and how has this motivation changed over time? To what extent has Australia’s continual resistance towards In Danger Listings shaped the perspective of the In Danger List as an instrument for shame and blame? How have Australia’s efforts to save political face, against the backdrop of clear scientific concern from the advisory bodies, contributed to raising its fear of loss? And, finally, what might we learn about competitive internationalism from a perspective that highlights loss of face or reputation—or risk thereof?
From Russia with love ... of heritage?
Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, London, UK, 2020
As states deploy material culture as a conduit for geopolitical advantage, we see the emergence o... more As states deploy material culture as a conduit for geopolitical advantage, we see the emergence of new forms of shared heritage. But surely none stranger than this. On 3 March 2018, former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found stricken from a Russian nerve agent on a public bench in Salisbury, UK. Attention focused on the possible involvement of two men, alleged to be Russian intelligence officers, known to have travelled from Russia to the UK—including to Salisbury—for 48 hours spanning these events. Traces of the nerve agent were found in their hotel room. Many were astounded however when the men implicated gave their alibi in an interview on Russian state television, claiming their purpose was simply to visit Salisbury Cathedral, “famous not just in Europe, but in the whole world. It’s famous for its 123-metre spire, it’s famous for its clock, the first one [of its kind] ever created in the world, which is still working.” As heritage became bound up in international espionage and assassination attempts, this paper dissects why—of all possibilities—Salisbury Cathedral featured in this most unlikely role. It explores the dissonance between the alibi's ostensible function as a guarantor of credulity and its broad reception as an absurdity that was evidence of deliberate international provocation. Drawing together recent approaches to heritage diplomacy and iconicity, it shows how this unusual case serves as a lens through which to revisit debates about universality and the future possibilities of heritage as a geopolitical actant.
Heritage as competitive internationalism (Session convenor)
Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Hangzhou, China, 2018
With their administrative technologies of lists, registers and awards, international heritage reg... more With their administrative technologies of lists, registers and awards, international heritage regimes have transcended their ostensible conservation function to join other forms of indexing and ranking cultures across borders. From city liveability indices and restaurant rankings to art, literature and architectural prizes, the increasing proliferation and prominence of these regimes plays into the concept of competitive internationalism, affecting global patterns of consumption, production and migration. The economic emergence of nations such as China has been followed by increased interest in such regimes as a means for states to accumulate cultural status markers recognised on the world stage. Yet many of these regimes also implicitly challenge the nation as a natural unit of analysis, constructing cities and regions as global players. As has been observed of heritage, the indexing and ranking of cultures thus works to both reinforce and transcend international borders.
This session considers how heritage figures within competitive internationalism. The multilateral World Heritage regime is the most prominent example of how heritage has been enlisted to index culture via international recognition, yet the concept spans millennia, from the original Seven Wonders of the World to the 21st century ‘New7Wonders’. Heritage sites, cities (as ‘capitals of culture’ etc), living cultural forms and even archives have become the subject of regimes of recognition. Increasing resources—both monetary and diplomatic—are deployed for these ends, contributing to the creation of sources of both celebration and conflict, as states, cities and other entities seek marginal advantage in a globalised and multipolar world. It is thus timely to consider these processes afresh.
To this end, this session invites papers that look at how competitive internationalism is assembled via international heritage concepts and practice. It especially welcomes perspectives from outside traditional heritage disciplines, and approaches that question the existing boundaries of heritage practice as an object of study or comparison. How do international heritage regimes enable global recognition, why is this sought after and who are the key agents seeking the recognition? What can be learned from other forms of indexing and ranking cultures? How does competitive internationalism support or undermine heritage conservation, and indeed might heritage conservation need to be decouple itself from such processes in order to achieve its conservation aims?
‘As a heritage professional like me’: the shift from expertise to professionalism in heritage practice
Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Hangzhou, China, 2018
Reflecting wider debates in academia and politics, the concept of expertise has well and truly en... more Reflecting wider debates in academia and politics, the concept of expertise has well and truly entered the frame of critical heritage studies. Vigorous critiques have cast expertise as socially constructed, enacting and reproducing social inequalities, and thus central to broader claims of how heritage practice conceals hegemonic tendencies. We also see the emergence of the concept of a ‘heritage professional’ as an occupational identity, reflected in the rise of consultancies modelled on professional services firms and university qualifications specifically geared to vocational aspirations. Yet despite a rich literature on professionalism in the social sciences, there has been little focus on how this concept can add to critical understandings of heritage practice. This paper aims to advance these debates both within heritage studies and studies of expertise and professionalism by considering how to read the shift from expertise to professionalism in heritage practice. Drawing on technical advisers’ accounts of their practice in the World Heritage regime, it shows how the border between expertise and professionalism is enacted. It argues that in light of critiques of expertise, heritage advisors foreground a discourse of professionalism rather than expertise to bolster claims to epistemic authority. At the same time, the literature on professionalism casts doubt on the stability and durability of professional claims, and invites us to think through the concept of a ‘heritage profession’. Against conceptions of professional autonomy associated with the traditional professionals of law and medicine, the concept of ‘new professionalism’ describes a mechanism effecting social, organisational and bureaucratic control. Other critiques highlight how professionalism is invoked to discipline ambiguous work, and contrast the traditional disciplines— which rarely need to defend their status—with the advent of so-called ‘minor professions’, such as nursing and social work, whose claim to professionalism is under constant challenge. It is therefore timely to consider whether this represents merely a strategic terminological substitution, a shift in ethic or a change in the conditions of heritage practice, and what the consequences might be.
Conserving a prestigious future for World Heritage
(ir)replaceable—a discussion about heritage, conservation and future-making, University of Canberra, Australia, 2017
Having reached near-universal ratification and with well over 1000 sites, the regime established ... more Having reached near-universal ratification and with well over 1000 sites, the regime established by the World Heritage Convention has emerged as a vital site of global conservation and competitive internationalism. With more sites officially slated for future nomination than already exist on the World Heritage List, states, cities and regions have clearly staked a future on their pasts. A scission has emerged however between visions of the Convention as primarily a conservation instrument and those who see its potential in future-making. Proposals to slow down or cap the growth of the List argue that this is essential to ensure conservation in a world of finite resources, yet others have observed that global interest in the List is—like capitalism—predicated on its continued growth and expansion. This poses a conundrum for heritage theory, practice and practitioners, challenging the assumed nexus between heritage value and conservation. Can competition between states, cities and regions be harnessed for conservation? Is World Heritage prestige being produced sustainably, or might the bubble burst? Perhaps most challengingly, by their continuing participation and ‘consecration-sanctification’, are heritage practitioners conserving their own place in the regime as much as the places they purport to care for?
Heritage, sustainability and social justice postgraduate symposium, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, 2016
This paper considers an aspect of how an important instrument of global heritage governance, the ... more This paper considers an aspect of how an important instrument of global heritage governance, the World Heritage Convention, became just that—globalised and governing—through a close analysis of a material artefact: the UNESCO World Heritage map. At first glance, it is easy to overlook the fact that the map only names those states that have signed the Convention: with only four states missing, the map now uncannily resembles an ordinary map of the world. UNESCO represents this near-universal membership of the Convention as a triumph. Scrutiny of the map’s absences, however, evokes more ambivalent precedents: of states’ maps that deliberately omit other states they do not recognise, or the spaces in colonial cartography left provisionally blank for territory yet to be acquired. This paper uses the World Heritage map as a device to explore the dissonance between the practical logic that drives agents of heritage globalisation, and the geopolitical and historical specificities of states and regions. Through its omission of non-member states’ names, the map makes indistinct borders won through the bloodiest national liberation struggles of the late 20th century, and visually annexes tiny Pacific islands to neighbouring states’ atolls. Yet dissonances are also found where states have joined the Convention—and literally put themselves on the map—in the midst of national calamity. Here, like so many other ordering processes such as lists, boundaries and names, I suggest the map introduces yet another scheme of classification through which global heritage governance is effected.
The objective of the symposium is to explore the possibilities for heritage to be used in a susta... more The objective of the symposium is to explore the possibilities for heritage to be used in a sustainable and socially just way in our globalised world. Conflict and its aftermath, the rapidly growing tourism industry, and the need to accommodate human and cultural rights from ethical perspectives are among factors that result in complex situations that challenge disciplinary and professional boundaries. This symposium includes papers in areas of ethics and human rights, Indigenous heritage, policy, conflict and postcolonial heritage, and museums and collections. It brings together postgraduate students of various disciplinary backgrounds and with experience in various geographical locations – including Australia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Chile, Iran, Iraq, China, Armenia and Sri Lanka – for two stimulating days of exchanging knowledge around the intersection of heritage, sustainability and social justice.
Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Canberra, Australia, 2014
An important emerging question in World Heritage scholarship is how to locate and give voice to t... more An important emerging question in World Heritage scholarship is how to locate and give voice to the local expert. This paper explores how this question is linked to the issue of what counts as expertise at the annual transnational World Heritage Committee meeting. It is not only that certain specific people are licensed to perform the role of heritage expert with ‘official’ status. Nor is it just that heritage expertise may be increasingly marginalized as nation states exert political will (Meskell 2014). This paper will argue that heritage expertise itself has doubtful status as the dominant form of expertise in this particular forum. As the World Heritage Convention reaches middle age, its annual showpiece meeting has developed a distinctive culture, and an expertise privileging international diplomatic and rhetorical skills adapted to both performance and back room negotiation. This paper will employ the concept of an ‘aesthetics of expertise’ used by Hodžić to analyse knowledge at the cultural boundaries of science and politics in global public health {Hodžić 2013} as a highly relevant way to approach knowledge practices in the World Heritage system. As places entering the World Heritage Committee process are transformed into texts and simulation, so too is their local expertise challenged to translate into forms of expertise that count at the Committee meeting. While this could be seen to challenge the primacy of place as the subject of the Convention, it could open new opportunities to recognise the World Heritage Committee as a locale itself with a local expertise, and from this recognition to better articulate claims of expertise, including those local to World Heritage properties, into this locale.
Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Canberra, Australia, 2014
ncreasing politicisation of World Heritage processes has been linked to growing interest by emerg... more ncreasing politicisation of World Heritage processes has been linked to growing interest by emergent states in the Convention processes as a tool for soft power, especially in Asia. It has also been linked to an undermined role for expert advice in the Convention processes. To date, it appears the focus of emerging states' interest in the Convention has been the prestige and economic reward of having their own properties inscribed, rather than cultural diplomacy through bilateral support for other states' World Heritage aspirations. By contrast, established World Heritage states in the region such as Japan, Korea and, perhaps until recently, Australia have increasingly seen the World Heritage Convention through a lens of soft power achieved through support to developing countries in the region – a meeting of cultural diplomacy and overseas development assistance. This support has included direct bilateral assistance and funding through multilateral heritage bodies such as UNESCO, and has included a focus on ‘upstream processes’, the preparation of management and conservation regimes as a precursor to nomination and inscription. This paper will focus on the link between the processes at the World Heritage Convention described as a ‘rush to inscribe’ (Meskell 2011) with the quieter background activity which could be described as the ‘rush to assist’, and in particular track the role that expert advice has played in both processes and the implications for conservation offered by each approach.
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Papers by Luke James
Conference Presentations by Luke James
Based on in‐depth interviews with experts and diplomatic decision‐makers working in the World Heritage system, this paper challenges the dominant view that technical expertise has been rendered subservient to politicised decision‐making at the annual World Heritage Committee meetings. Using Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and drawing on emerging case studies from Asia and the Pacific, this paper traces the construction and circulation of expert knowledge in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage system, finding expertise and technical experts present in unexpected places, both in the negotiated deal making and diplomatic dimensions of World Heritage.
This session considers how heritage figures within competitive internationalism. The multilateral World Heritage regime is the most prominent example of how heritage has been enlisted to index culture via international recognition, yet the concept spans millennia, from the original Seven Wonders of the World to the 21st century ‘New7Wonders’. Heritage sites, cities (as ‘capitals of culture’ etc), living cultural forms and even archives have become the subject of regimes of recognition. Increasing resources—both monetary and diplomatic—are deployed for these ends, contributing to the creation of sources of both celebration and conflict, as states, cities and other entities seek marginal advantage in a globalised and multipolar world. It is thus timely to consider these processes afresh.
To this end, this session invites papers that look at how competitive internationalism is assembled via international heritage concepts and practice. It especially welcomes perspectives from outside traditional heritage disciplines, and approaches that question the existing boundaries of heritage practice as an object of study or comparison. How do international heritage regimes enable global recognition, why is this sought after and who are the key agents seeking the recognition? What can be learned from other forms of indexing and ranking cultures? How does competitive internationalism support or undermine heritage conservation, and indeed might heritage conservation need to be decouple itself from such processes in order to achieve its conservation aims?