1st Edition
The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Affect Designing and Experiencing Places of Heritage
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
1 Introduction: Foundations and Frontiers for Heritage and Affect
Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person
2 Decolonising Emotion and Affect: Taking ‘Other’ Knowledges Seriously at the Heritage Site
Divya Tolia-Kelly and Emma Waterton
3 Anger as an Affective Tool: Cultural Heritage, Cultural Vandalism, and Confederate Monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia
Erika Doss
4 Ineffability in Critical Heritage: Towards New Ontologies of Heritage
Shanti Sumartojo and Christopher Whitehead
5 Emerging Methods in Affect and Heritage Studies
Tess Osborne and Danielle Drozdzewski
6 Frontiers in Trauma-Informed Heritage Research: Using Biosensors to Measure Visitor Nervous System Responses at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, Angela M. Person and Christopher D. Black
7 Using Computational Methods to Evaluate Affective Relevance at Historically Distant Heritage: What is ‘Hot’ and What is Not?
Andrea Kocsis
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
Audrey Reeves, Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas and Angela M. Person
9 Establishing Historical Significance in Wereldmuseum Amsterdam: Our Colonial Inheritance as Transformative Experience
Pieter de Bruijn and Geerte M. Savenije
10National Parks and Ambiguous Affect: “American Latino Heritage” and the Castillo de San Marcos in Saint Augustine, Florida
Ivy Chen
11 Decolonizing Heritage: Learning from the Atacama Desert, Affect and Uywaña
Victoria Vargas-Downing
12 Undesired Emotion: Visible Storage and the Presentation of Antisemitism in the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna
Yaniv Feller
13 Meta-memorial: Atmospheres, Ambiguity and Affect at Sarajevo’s Vraca Memorial Park
Sabina Tanović and Dario Kristić
14 The Embodied Emotionality of Repair: Listening to Black Women Elders and Descendants in Rondo
Parvathy Binoy
15 Affective Regeneration at Kent State
Chris W. Post
16 Curating Conflict-Related Sexual Violence: Gender, Politics and Memory at War Museums
Audrey Reeves and Hannah Gignoux
SECTION 2
Immersive Technologies, Affect, and Cultural Heritage
17 Introduction: Immersive Technologies, Affect, and Cultural Heritage
Heidi J. Boisvert, Felipe Flores and Emily Lange
18 Sounding a Politics of Immersion: Warren Realrider’s Pawnee Noise
Robert Bailey
19 Augmented Reality at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Sara Pitcairn
20 Engaging Palestinian Youth in Their Heritage Through the Creation of a Virtual Reality Documentary
Sohail Dahdal
21 Archive-Ruins: Method for Affective Historiography of Wadi Salib
Eytan Mann
22 Listening to Change: Affect, Atmosphere, Architecture, and Oral Histories in Audio Augmented Reality
Andrew Demirjian
23 Animating Affect: The Use of 3D Laser Scanning in Architectural and Heritage Research located in Huddersfield, UK
Nic Clear
SECTION 3
Immersive Art and Design
24 Introduction: Immersive Art and Design
Rusaila Bazlamit and Sohail Dahdal
25 Stepping into a Painting: Ethics and Affect in the Van Gogh Immersive Experience
Elisabetta Modena
26 Curating the End of Love: From Individual Memories to Heritage-making at the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb
Annaclaudia Martini
27 Designing Heritage Atmospheres: ‘Feeling’ Norwegian at the Oslo Opera House
Jeremy Hektor Payne-Frank
28 Sounding Grainger: Museum as Affective Atmosphere
Rochus Urban Hinkel
29 Fostering Empathy through Augmented Reality: Exploring Incarcerated Perspectives of the Adelaide Gaol's Dark Heritage
Susannah Emery and Erik Champion
30 Affective Heritage and Embodied Experiences through Design
Asma Mehan and Sina Mostafavi
31 Public Geographies of Racial Segregation: Designing Museum Spaces to Embody History and Emplace Identities
John C. Finn and Jakira A. Silas
SECTION 4
Embodiment, Affect, and Heritage Architecture
32 Introduction: Embodiment, Affect, and Heritage Architecture
Andrea Jelić and Aleksandar Staničić
33 Learning about Affect in Heritage from Diverse Bodies and Minds: The Case of the Leuven Town Hall
Negin Eisazadeh, Ann Heylighen and Claudine Houbart
34 Selective Permeability, Political Affordance, and the Atmospheric Qualities of Tahrir Square
Matthew Crippen and Maria Almendra Sotelo
35 Children and Young People’s Embodied Experiences of Industrial Heritage: The Case of the Fábrica Centro Ciência Viva
Gaëlle Pillault, Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink, and Fátima Pombo
36 Caring for Silence Heritages: Silence and the Ascetic Landscape of Mount Athos
Christos Antonios Kakalis
37 Reconvening Affective Sonic Pasts: Identification of Sonic Affordances in Historic Architecture
Pamela Jordan
38 Touching Traces of the Past: Affording Affective Atmospheres
Anthony R. Brand
39 Architectural Proportion Beyond Beauty: A Psychophysical Perspective
Tiziana Proietti and Sergei Gepshtein
40 The Atmosphere of Ruins: Aesthetics of Decay after the Affective Turn
Tonino Griffero and Federico De Matteis
SECTION 5
Affect in Practice: The Ethics of Deploying Affect
41 Introduction: Affect in Practice: The Ethics of Deploying Affect
Perry L. Carter and Amy E. Potter
42 Materializing Loss: Affective Practices of Grieving and Mourning in the Symbolic Cemeteries of Biobío, Chile
Camila Martorell Felis
43 The Ethics of “Simple” Technologies: Affect, The Frontier Myth, and Literary Tourism at the Ingalls Homestead in Desmet, South Dakota, USA
Rebecca Sheehan and Kimberly K. Johnson Maier
44 “Crime Doesn’t Pay”: Carceral Affects and Displaying the Electric Chair in McAlester, Oklahoma
Katrina Ward
45 Ethics and Military Heritage: An Affect-Centred Approach
Emma Waterton and Jason Dittmer
46 “It Takes an Emotional Toll on All of Them:” Considerations for the Ethics of the Technological Deployment of Affect and Emotion at Museums Interpreting African American History
Amy E. Potter, Stephen P. Hanna, Perry L. Carter, LaToya E. Eaves, Matthew R. Cook, and Candace Forbes Bright
Index
Biography
Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Museum Studies Graduate Program at the University of Florida, USA. Her research explores the affective politics of cultural trauma, memory, and heritage-making in places of difficult heritage. She is the author of Affective Heritage and the Politics of Memory After 9/11 (Routledge, 2021), and co-editor of More-Than-Respresentational Geographies of Heritage (Routledge, 2020).
Angela M. Person is Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean for Research and External Engagement at the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Her research is at the intersection of architecture, cultural heritage, and sustainability. She has co-curated several major exhibitions, including Capital Brutalism at the National Building Museum (2024-2025).
"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)






