Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage sector in the context of green transitions (PITCH) brings together academic and cultural sector organisation partners in six countries to spur on the processes by which humanities and arts scholarship and public interventions can strengthen citizen engagement with the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and its relationship to past and present petrocultures. Our innovative and significant multi-site pilot events will provide a model for employing cultural heritage to creatively engage citizens to spur on environmentally-transformative shifts in both individual and collective organisational/institutional behaviours. We will provide heritage practitioners and policymakers with the tools to repurpose existing and future forms of heritage to facilitate just green transitions. PITCH will create a deeper understanding of petroculture’s intersections with heritage practices and how this reflects social,economic, and political changes over time through our historical and analytical work in archives and collections and map the secondary literature on the intersections between petrocultures and heritage cultures. We will conduct pilot interventions at three different types of sites (museums, industrial heritage sites, and heritage landscapes) with four cultural heritage partners to help citizens understand how petrocultures have affected their lives and be confident about how they might envision those lives otherwise. In order to ensure the long-lasting impact of the pilot interventions, we will collaborate with key international and European policy-making and practitioner organisations to help citizens face current and future societal transformations with greater confidence. We will develop policy briefings and digital toolkit to ensure the recommended methods are effective across the cultural, geographic, political and socio-economic diversity of Europe.  

CHEurope is a PhD training program in cultural heritage supported by the European Union under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (MSCA) – Innovative Training Networks (ITN). The project is the result of a collaboration between key European academic and non-academic organisations in Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Italy, supporting the research and training of 15 Early Stage Researchers from Europe and other parts of the world. CHEurope aims at developing a new integrated framework to enhance the academic and professional training and open future job opportunities in cultural heritage preservation, management and promotion. The program is based on themes where cultural heritage is undergoing profound change, such as Heritage Futures, Curating the City, Digital Heritage, Heritage and Wellbeing and Management and Citizen Participation. Work package 1: Theorizing heritage futures in Europe This WP aims to better understand how heritage has implicated the future of Europe. It proceeds from an assumption that different fields of heritage and conservation practice assemble different kinds of futures, and that exploring them in comparative perspective will help practitioners understand how they might work together in identifying common objectives across the broad sectoral divisions of natural and cultural and tangible and intangible heritage conservation. Doing so will aid researchers and heritage practitioners in identifying connections with, and innovative and sustainable solutions to, key contemporary social, ecological and political issues in which the “heritage” and the “past” are implicated.  The WP aims to engage with current global crises—the “migrant crisis”, “Brexit” and the changing membership of the European Union, and climate change, for example—and the ways in which these crises might be viewed and analysed from the perspective of critical heritage studies. WP has three key objectives:  1/To develop methodologies,...