Facts

Contact person:
Adam Lundberg
Financer:
  • The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG)
Responsible at MaU:
Adam Lundberg
External project members:
  • Erik Jönsson - Uppsala universitet
Collaborators :
  • Uppsala universitet
Time frame:
01 January 2026 - 31 December 2026
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:

About the project

In a world shaped by both voluntary and forced migration, as well as formal international exchanges and trade in historical artefacts, memories and mementoes are increasingly dislodged from stable resting places and local political contexts. While some artefacts – such as parts of the famous Qin terracotta army – are taken on international tours, others – such as the Benin bronzes – become focal points in heated international and local heritage-political debates about ownership and belonging. Moreover, monuments, once erected to celebrate national(ist) histories, now face contestation both in terms of their message and physical presence. This network aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with a shared interest in tracing these processes and thereby scrutinising how and where particular memories surface today.

Participants’ interests span a range of topics: the transformation of political infrastructures into museum objects (Jönsson, 2025); the displacement of Assyrian cultural heritage artefacts – and people –through war and colonial legacies (Lundberg, 2025); crofts as mediators of individual and cultural memory (Lagerqvist, 2014); and the planning of public monuments commemorating immigrant diasporas’ experiences of racist violence (Nilsson Mohammadi, 2023), and the heritage- and memory-making processes of relocating old trees (Rosengren, 2023). Together, these researchers address and seek to explore a need to integrate perspectives from geography and the humanities – fields capable of analysing both heritage artefacts and their movement across time (past/present) and space (here/there). The network will also critically engage with the growing trend of artistic and scholarly interventions in museums, collections, and exhibitions.