Encounters of amateurs and professionals with tangible cultural heritage

The two speakers in this seminar introduce different perspectives on engagements with tangible cultural heritage outside the realm of custodial heritage organizations and academic scholarship, and explore the diversity of actors, practices, and implications of such engagements for the poetics and ethics of institutional heritage work. Suzie Thomas explores the engagement of metal detectorists with difficult and dark heritage of the recent past in northern Europe, and questions the response of official archaeology towards this activity. Costis Dallas looks into the curation and affiliative identity practices of heritage professionals, source communities and amateurs on social network sites in Greece, and probes their institutional implications. Based on their research, speakers will debate questions of identity work, social curation, place and objectual agency, participation and creativity, contestation and power, and institutional logic emerging from these onsite and online explorations of heritage encounters outside the fold of custodial heritage practice.

Dr Suzie Thomas is University Lecturer in Museology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She obtained her PhD in Heritage Studies from Newcastle University, UK, in 2009. Since September 2015 she has been on research leave to work on the Lapland's Dark Heritage project (http://blogs.helsinki.fi/lapland-dark-heritage), funded by the Academy of Finland. She is co-editor of the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage.

Prof. Costis Dallas is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, and Research Fellow of the Digital Curation Unit, "Athena" Research Centre, Greece. His current research is on digital curation of thing cultures "in the wild", on scholarly practices in the pervasive digital environment, and on identity and memory work in social network site interactions around cultural heritage.

The seminar is organised in collaboration with Arcaheological Information in the Digital Society research project (arkdis-project.blogspot.se) and COST Action CA15201 Archeological practices and knowledge work in the digital environment (www.arkwork.eu) and Research Node KOM (Knowledge Organisation and Power).