IRES: Culture and Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)

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This US-Spain IRES project further develops and expands research and training opportunities related to the anthropology of culture and heritage in Europe successfully launched in the 2010-2013 NSF-funded CHESS program (OISE-0968575). This project will provide an early-career international research experience for fifteen (15) undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Five Colleges consortium. The PI and co-PI will recruit three cohorts of students to conduct systematic, comparative research around the theme of "Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)" as part of a three-year research project and training program in collaboration with the Department of Anthropological Sciences at the University of Barcelona in Spain. For each of the three years, research projects will be organized around a central research stream: highlighting specific strengths of the US and Spanish faculty: 1) "Crisis, culture, and heritage" (2013-2014); 2) "Sustainable heritage, communities, and economies" (2014-2015); and 3) "Social Justice, heritage, and changing forms of value" (2015-2016). Students will be trained through a course series in research design and methods, field research in Europe, and data analysis and writing for publication. International research and training workshops at the two universities will provide US students with intensive mentoring from renowned European scholars, as well as networking and collaboration with their international peers. Intellectual merit: Anthropologists have critically engaged the concepts of culture and heritage for decades, but the rise of the field of heritage studies offers new opportunities for ethnographic investigation of how these central disciplinary concepts are being used by policymakers, citizens, and other social actors. By developing their projects in relation to a central set of research questions, students will contribute to three key areas of inquiry for the larger comparative investigation of culture and heritage as sites of contestation, conflict, and cohesion in Europe. The proposed CHESS program provides an integrative framework for an ethnographic field school that will draw the participation of students across the four subfields of anthropology (cultural, linguistic, archaeological, and biological) and serve as a model for interdisciplinary research teambuilding. Broader impacts: Government institutions face new demands to develop public programming that reflects our nation's diverse, multicultural heritage, and there is a growing need for social scientists trained in the anthropology of heritage and related fields. Broader impacts of the project include 1) training a diverse group of fifteen (15) US students for international, comparative anthropological research on cultural heritage policies and debates, 2) developing scientific research networks between anthropologists in the US and Spain that will form the basis for further international research projects and ongoing relationships, including synergistic initiatives between the UMass Department of Anthropology, and new certificate programs in Heritage and Society Studies and Modern European Studies, the Five Colleges consortium, and European partner institutions; 3) collaborating with faculty and students from Spain to produce a body of systematic, comparative research on debates surrounding heritage management in Europe, including research reports, peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations, project-related theses, and multimedia case studies for use by community organizations, policymakers, and classroom instructors. These publications are available to the general public through a CHESS project website professionally archived by the UMass Amherst library. Holding an international CHESS workshop at UMass Amherst each year of the program further extends the broader impacts enabling at least 30 U.S. students to develop international professional networks, mentoring relationships, and collaborators.