The Association of Critical Heritage Studies was launched with an inauguation conference in Gothenburg in June 5-8 2012 . The conference theme was “Re-theorizing heritage” and it hosted more than 500 participants from all continents of the world. Over 400 papers were presented in more than 50 sessions where questions and discussions were encouraged, covering critical views on a wide range of subjects.

The tag cloud below is the result from a listing of the 50 most common keywords in the abstracts for papers, which were published on the conference website!

A short note on the keywords

Of course the frequent presence of the words heritage (2032), cultural (640), paper (395), university (313), studies (333), research (246) and ‘work’ (172) is obvious.

Notable is the frequent presence of ‘sites’ (340), which of course includes both web sites and geographical sites.  Geographically, ‘local’ (233) and national (221) are most frequent, followed by world (191) and international (124).

‘History’(284)  is more frequent than ‘memory’ (226) – especially when including ‘historical’ (187) as well, but more notable ’present’(202) is almost as frequent as ‘past’ (218).

The societal relation to cultural heritage is displayed by the frequency of the words ‘community’ (250), political (208) and ‘social’ (206).

‘Critical’ (194) is stressed as important by the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, other frequent keywords from a critical approach are ‘values’ (200) and ‘process’ (219).

From the perspective of a ‘museum’ (197), one could note the keywords ‘identity’ (174), ‘conservation’ (171), ‘intangible’ (143), ‘public’ (142), ‘people’ (136), ‘practice’ (132) and ‘objects’ (133).