Speaker: Dr Rachael Kiddey (University of Oxford)
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From the Black Lives Matter movement to the U.K. Culture Secretary’s ‘War on Woke’, it is clear that ‘The Past’ remains powerfully political and that cultural heritage – statues, stolen lands, decimated languages, negated customs – is often where such Politics manifests. Politics is fundamentally about representation and cannot have ethics because ‘ethical action is exactly that which cannot be delegated or represented’ (Badiou 2015, 404). This presentation explores the epistemological relationship between politics and ethics as applied in the creation of a recent digital heritage exhibition called ‘Made in Migration’, where data were gathered in collaboration and the online exhibition was co-curated with displaced people. In the talk, I suggest that cultural heritage has a vital role in helping to articulate a new ethical politics which is necessarily independent of organised State processes. To achieve this, I contend that by engaging broadly prefigurative principles – which recognise that ‘societies emerge from the practices which create them’ (Borck & Sanger 2017,9) - marginalised communities can be more fully enabled to participate in heritage making processes, thus leading to ‘future pasts’ which are more inclusive (cf. Borck, 2019).