The 7th National Forum on Historic Preservation Practice: A Critical Examination of the Next 50 Years March 19-20, 2016 To be held at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland Call for Papers Sponsored by the Master of Arts in Historic Preservation Program, Goucher College, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. Co-Sponsors […]
Month: July 2015
Conservation as a process and not an end product — or, where’s the “soul”?
I was reading an article today by Felipe Criado-Boado y David Barreiro, “El patrimonio era otra cosa” (“Heritage Was Something Else”), which emphasizes that the formation of the meanings of cultural heritage is an open process subject to negotiation. What struck my attention was their argument that the conflicts inherent in these meanings should be “normalized”; […]
Object versus subject centered heritage and the Main Street Program
Several years ago, I read John Schofield’s (2009) description of “allocentric” versus “autocentric” heritage. He associates allocentric heritage with objective, scientific, fixed, and detached meanings and autocentric heritage with subjective, emotional, and changing meanings. The former is associated with orthodox conservation theory and practice and the latter with heterodox conservation theory and practice. (Smith’s [2006] […]
2016 Association of Critical Heritage Studies call for papers
Second announcement ACHS 2016 call for sessions and papers VENUE The conference What does heritage change? is an initiative of the Canada Research Chair on Urban Heritage at the School of Management of Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), in partnership with Concordia University and its Centre for Oral history and digital storytelling. As […]
How do you teach environment-behavior research for the historic environment?
In 2012, my colleague, Eleftherios Pavlides, who teaches environmental design research in the architecture program at Roger Williams University helped spearhead the creation of the Environmental Design Research Education Knowledge Network at the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). While environment-behavior research has foundations going back to the 1960s, this knowledge network was the first time […]
Heritage Conservation through the Lenses of Environment-Behavior Research and Conservation Social Science
One of the things I really love about the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) is the multidisciplinary nature of their conference. It’s one of the few venues where it doesn’t really matter what your discipline is; instead, it’s the particular topics that people address that are most important. At the conference, it’s not unusual to […]
U of FL’s Preservation Institute: Nantucket
Since 1972, over 600 students have participated in the University of Florida’s historic preservation summer field school on the island of Nantucket (Massachusetts, USA) known as “Preservation Institute:Nantucket” or “PI:N”. Students need not be previously enrolled at the U of FL for courses; the main requirement is that students must normally have a bachelor’s degree. […]
Future of Preservation Meeting
Last month, I was invited to participate in the “Future of Preservation” meeting at the UMass, Amherst campus that was co-organized by Max Page from UMass, Amherst, Tom Mayes from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Randall Mason from the University of Pennsylvania. In preparation for the meeting, all of the participants were asked […]
Visual Harmony in Relation to Camp Santanoni
Students in many graduate programs are faced with what is, at times, a daunting challenge of researching and writing a thesis. This is especially true when the thesis is empirical–in other words, the student has to employ a particular research methodology to collect, analyze, and then interpret data to answer a research question. Since 2011, […]
Cutler House listed on the National Register
At Roger Williams University, where I teach in the historic preservation program, we give our masters’ students the opportunity to complete an empirical (research) thesis or a capstone project. While many thesis students use social science methods to address historic preservation/heritage conservation topics, others choose to focus on a professional project, such as a National […]