Material Life of Local Heritage: Objects, Places, and Local–Global Relations

Local heritage is not just a matter of memory, identity, or representation. It is also created through material forms such as buildings, ruins, monuments, museums, archives, landscapes, routes, signs, guidebooks, digital media, and everyday infrastructures. These material arrangements shape how local histories are told, how communities are portrayed, and how places relate to national and global contexts. This session invites papers that examine the material life of local heritage in relation to local–global relations. We welcome empirical studies of heritage sites, museums, industrial remains, urban and rural landscapes, memorial spaces, tourist routes, festivals, community archives, and other heritage-related objects and places. Papers may address the preservation, display, commercialization, contestation, or translation of local heritage across various institutional and cultural contexts. The session is particularly interested in how material heritage mediates relations among local residents, experts, governments, international organizations, tourists, markets, and civil society actors. How do particular objects and places become shared points of reference? How do they include some histories while marginalizing others? How do they connect local communities to wider regional, national, or global narratives? We also welcome conceptual and methodological contributions that develop tools for analyzing heritage objects, material mediation, spatial and temporal boundary-making, and shifting relations among places, communities, institutions, and broader social systems. We aim to explore local heritage not as a fixed cultural possession but as an active, material process through which local-global relations are produced and transformed.