Planning and Geography

Submission deadline: 1 November 2015
Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 November 2015
Conference: Association of Critical Heritage Studies conference 2016
Location and date: Montreal, Canada, 6-10 June 2016

Session Title:
Activism, Civil Society and Heritage
Session type:
Regular paper session, open
Description:
Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. Since the late 1980s, the phenomenon of contestation in heritage has been increasingly recognised. However, there is still little detailed and situated knowledge about the range of actors present in contestations, the variety of strategies they pursue, the reasoning behind their choices, the networks they develop, and how from all this, heritage has been and is constructed. More often than not, contestation appears to be essentialised as occurring between the ‘state’ (often treated as a monolith) and the people or the community (such as certain uses of the idea of Authorised Heritage Discourse in Uses of Heritage). Following this trend, much of the growing body of scholarship on heritage has tended to assume universalising theoretical positions based on limited, specific contexts, thus somewhat compromising the ability to draw nuanced and theoretical positions that take into account the diversity of contexts within which heritage is produced.
This panel acknowledges the emerging trends in heritage studies which take into account what may be described as relational aspects of heritage construction, such as those inspired by Deleuze, which examine heritage in terms of assemblages (Harrison 2013), Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (Krauss 2008), or other approaches that are increasingly considering heritage as part of human, material and social flows. The premise of this panel is that heritage is constructed, contested, and negotiated through actions of players or actors and within traceable places and spaces (arenas) through the course of time. Of interest here are the mechanisms of heritage construction and contestation as well as the conceptual and theoretical perspectives that may drive interpretation of realities on the ground.
The panel is open to scholars from any field of enquiry. We invite contributors to focus on different aspects of heritage in diverse areas to examine questions including but not limited to the following:
• Activism is not limited to individuals. A player in heritage may be an individual, a compound player such as an NGO, or even a state entity such as a heritage organisation with divergent internal perspectives. Who is a heritage activist? How do activists identify themselves?
• How does the material turn in social sciences, with its recognition of the role of non-human actors and distributed agency, transform our understanding of contentious heritage?
• What is the micro-politics of heritage in social movements including preservationist movements?
• What is the relationship between heritage and individual or collective activism?
• How does activism change heritage and how does heritage change activism?
• How does engagement with media transform heritage? What are the preferred modes of communication and media for heritage and why? What does the preference tell us about the relationship between civil society, public sphere and heritage?
• How and why is heritage transformed into a cause?
• How does advocacy for heritage manifest itself?
• Where does contestation take place? And why?
• What is the role of space and place in forms of contesting heritage? Does contestation lead to new definitions and experiences of place and space? At what scales?
• Other questions that may explore the relationship between agency, materiality, affect and heritage will also be considered.
Conveners:
Dr Ali Mozaffari, Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University (email: a.mozaffari@curtin.edu.au)
Ali Mozaffari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and the founding co-editor of Berghahn series Explorations in Heritage Studies. His publications include:
• Mozaffari, A. 2014. Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place. London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.
• Mozaffari, A. ed. 2014. World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae. London, UK: Ashgate.
• Mozaffari, Ali. 2015. “The Heritage ‘NGO’: A Case Study on the Role of Grass Roots Heritage Societies in Iran and Their Perception of Cultural Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (9). doi:10.1080/13527258.2015.1028961.

Dr Tod Jones, Department of Geography and Planning, School of Built Environment, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University (email:t.jones@curtin.edu.au)
Tod Jones is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Geography. His publications include:
• Jones, T. S. 2013. Culture, Power and Authoritarianism in the Indonesian State. Cultural Policy Across the Twentieth Century to the Reform Era. Netherlands: Brill.
• Jones, T. S., and M. Talebian. 2014. “Perspectives and Prospects for Cultural Tourism in the Pasargadae Religion.” In World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae, ed. Ali Mozaffari, 155-172. England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
• Jones, T. S., and C. L. Birdsall Jones. 2014. “Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions.”International Journal of Cultural Policy 20 (3): 296-317.

In Papua New Guinea (PNG) more rural people, and especially rural women, earn cash from selling in marketplaces than from any other source. PNG's marketplaces are critical for food security, and for the redistribution of wealth. They are also important meeting places where people gather to see friends, hear the latest news, attend court cases, play cards and be entertained. This introduction to this special issue on 'Marketplaces and Morality in Papua New Guinea' reviews the history of PNG marketplaces and their contemporary forms. It charts their transformation from introduced colonial spaces into dynamic Melanesian places, which, as places to buy, sell and socialise, have become pervasive institutions in the lives of both urban and rural Papua New Guineans, and places where people interact with both known and unknown others. From this, marketplaces emerge as important spaces of moral evaluation and contestation in relation to what constitutes morally acceptable exchange and what practices are acceptable in these places. The paper demonstrates that exchange in the marketplace should not be reduced to commodity transactions, and questions assumptions about the types of people marketplaces create. It argues that the country's marketplaces are productive sites to consider ideas of exchange, social relations and social personhood, and that there is a critical need to understand the concrete details of what takes place in contemporary marketplaces.

This project examined the factors explaining women’s low level of engagement in small-scale agricultural enterprises and identified key pathways facilitating women’s move into managing their own small-scale enterprises. The goal was to gain new knowledge to design strategies to assist women to increase their involvement in small-scale rural enterprises.

Rural women in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are keen to increase their cash incomes. Whilst research among smallholder households has demonstrated the important role of women in the production and sale of agricultural produce, few studies have focused on the opportunities or barriers to women engaging more strongly in the agricultural sector, especially as managers of small-scale agricultural enterprises. This project addressed these knowledge gaps by drawing on and building on previous ACIAR socio-economic studies (ASEM/2006/127; ASEM/2008/036; ASEM/2010/052; ASEM/2012/072; ASEM/2014/095) to develop a detailed understanding of the enabling factors contributing to the success of entrepreneurial women in the agricultural sector.

The main achievements and impacts of the project are:
• Successful trial and evaluation of the Village Savings and Loans Association (VSLA) model to develop rural women’s financial and business management skills. There are now eight VSLA groups established in PNG, two piloted under this project, four subsequently established by CARE and two established by Coffee Industry Corporation (CIC) with CARE support. Women’s savings levels, access to credit, and rates of establishment or expansion of micro/small-scale enterprises all improved
• Better understanding of the role and effectiveness of gender-specific agricultural extension programs for improving women’s economic empowerment and participation in export cropping.
• Greater knowledge of the main socio-cultural and economic factors affecting women’s participation in agribusiness and the key processes and pathways that facilitate women’s involvement in agribusiness.
• Identification of new and emerging entrepreneurial opportunities and risks for women in fresh food trading as intermediaries and wholesalers with the growth in volume and complexity of domestic commodity markets.
• Capacity building of three PNG Early Career Researchers through postgraduate studies at Curtin University and Unitech, PNG.
• Completion of a range of scientific and industry publications.
• Enhanced collaboration between research institutions, private sector and NGOs in the coffee and oil palm industries to enable more collaborative and gender-inclusive approaches in agricultural extension.

Further information on the project and outputs can be accessed from the Pacific Livelihoods Research Group website: www.pacificlivelihoods.com

This report provides an overview of the current nature of the domestic trade in dry coconuts and the importance of fresh food marketplaces to household livelihoods and food security in PNG. It documents findings from surveys conducted in 2015 and 2016 on the sale of coconuts at 16 local marketplaces in the cocoa/copra and oil palm producing areas in East New Britain (ENB), West New Britain (WNB) and Milne Bay (MB) Provinces. More broadly, the report examines the flexible and adaptive livelihoods of smallholder producers in PNG, in particular the integration of export cash cropping and the production of fresh food for local marketplaces within household livelihood strategies.

Open-air marketplaces are vital to food security, livelihoods, and the national economy in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Over the past 60 years, rapid growth of urban populations, changes in global commodity prices, and the decline in value of the PNG currency have stimulated demand for domestic fresh food. Selling fresh food in marketplaces has also become an attractive way to earn money for rural producers, whose returns on labour on their export crops have declined, and for urban residents struggling to make a living. This in turn has led to significant changes in PNGʼs marketplaces: spatial and temporal changes, changes in what is bought and sold, changes in who is selling, and changes in how food is transacted. In this paper, we bring together research on PNGʼs marketplaces from between 1961 and 2022 to document these changes and their causes, alongside important continuities, and to examine the implications and substantial gaps in our knowledge.