1st Edition

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Affect Designing and Experiencing Places of Heritage

Edited By Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, Angela M. Person Copyright 2027
780 Pages 107 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge International Handbook on Heritage and Affect brings together leading and emerging scholars, practitioners, designers, and artists to examine how heritage environments shape and are shaped by affect, emotion, embodiment, and power. Addressing museums, memorials, landscapes, and immersive heritage practices worldwide, the volume situates affect at the center of contemporary... Read more

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)