International Journal of Heritage Studies 

About: International Journal of Heritage Studies is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Cultural heritage & Cultural heritage management. It has an ISSN identifier of 1352-7258. Over the lifetime, 1375 publications have been published receiving 25903 citations. The journal is also known as: IJHS & International journal of heritage studies.

Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: temporality, meaning and the scope of heritage studies

Abstract: With the apparent focus of work carried out by the heritage 'community' very much directed towards heritage practices in the present, the potential historical scope for the discipline as a whole, becomes ever-more temporally closed. This paper makes space for a longer historical analysis of the development of heritage as a process. The paper ranges over the evolution of a medieval sense of heritage and how it is related to transitions in the experience of space and place, and also explores some early modern developments in the heritage concept, relating them to societal changes associated with colonial (and post-colonial) experience. This deeper understanding of the historically contingent and embedded nature of heritage allows us to go beyond treating heritage simply as a set of problems to be solved, and enables us to engage with debates about the production of identity, power and authority throughout society.

Guided by the dark: From thanatopsis to thanatourism

Abstract: Death is the one heritage that everyone shares and it has been an element of tourism longer than any other form of heritage. This paper looks at the historical development of Thanatoptic elements in travel and shows how the Dark Tourism to which this issue is devoted can be located within a historical tradition which sheds light on how it should be defined, typified and viewed today

JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination

Abstract: This paper sets out to explore the phenomenon that the authors have entitled Dark Tourism and to analyse evidence of its existence in the context of sites associated with the life and death of the former US President, John F. Kennedy (JFK). These sites present front‐line staff, curators, and development bodies with dilemmas concerning legitimacy of presentation/representation and lead to questions about the, often cited, educational mission, of such attractions. The media has had a central role in the development of this phenomenon and documentation and illustration via news and film has been central to much of the interpretation of JFK and the Kennedys. This paper considers media fascination with this subject and examines exploitation of this interest at three, contrasting sites.

The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage

Abstract: This paper revisits the notion of ‘community’ within the field of heritage, examining the varied ways in which tensions between different groups and their aspirations arise and are mediated. Our focus is a close examination of the conceptual disjunction that exists between a range of popular, political and academic attempts to define and negotiate memory, place, identity and cultural expression. To do so, the paper places emphasis on those expressions of community that have been taken up within dominant political and academic practice. Such expressions, we argue, are embedded with restrictive assumptions concerned with nostalgia, consensus and homogeneity, all of which help to facilitate the extent to which systemic issues tied up with social justice, recognition and subordinate status are ignored or go unidentified. This, inevitably, has serious and far‐reaching consequences for community groups seeking to assert alternative understandings of heritage. Indeed, the net result has seen the virtual disappea...

The Scope and Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible

Abstract: Since the adoption of the Venice Charter in 1964, there have been many conservation guidelines in the form of charters, recommendations and resolutions that have been introduced and adopted by international organisations such as UNESCO and ICOMOS. This article focuses on the scope and definition of heritage as promulgated by the various charters across the globe. The term ‘historic monument’ used in the Venice Charter 1964 was reinterpreted by ICOMOS in 1965 as ‘monument’ and ‘site’; and by UNESCO in 1968 as ‘cultural property’ to include both movable and immovable. The different terminology between the UNESCO and ICOMOS was reconciled at the World Heritage Convention 1972. At national and regional levels the scope of heritage was broadened to include gardens, landscape and environment, and later reinterpreted and defined quite differently in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and China. Although the scope of heritage, in general, is now agreed internationally to include ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ as...