November 2020: "Fraying edges upon the ‘utmost corners of the warld’" (Cait McCullagh)

Fraying edges upon the ‘utmost corners of the warld’: Maritime heritages, worlding, and becoming in the edgy centres of the Northern Isles

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Including excerpts from films co-produced with people across islands in Orkney and Shetland, this seminar explores how public ethnology can support communities and groups to consider and decide together what it is that is critical about heritage-making in their environments through collaboratively deliberating the dissonance between formal heritage work and everyday nature-cultural expressions.  Based on her extended, practice-based research  into the elicitation of social learning on the consequences of heritage value formations for local identity-building and futures-assembling, Cait McCullagh shares how, from the centres of their diverse experiences, participants in the research cross-cut the edges of roles, disciplines, practices, and cultures to co-curate ‘becoming’ heritages. 

These reflexive traditions are presented as individual and community 'potential histories', anticipatory responses to contemporary concerns including the nature-culture impacts of contested sea-uses: marine energy extraction; fisheries, and cruise tourism.  The seminar opens-up perceptions of so-named peripheries, to consider how continental, or land-locked perspectives, anchored in coloniality, can edge-out 'archipelago thinking'.  The littoral edge is proposed both as metaphor and place of particular, yet connective, mutable renovation where the ill-fit and unsuitability of established norms stimulates people to make cutting edge alignments , collaborating for possible, place-centred and world-focused futures.

Cait McCullagh, The Institute for Northern Studies, UHI and The intercultural Research Centre, Heriot-Watt University.

Thursday 26th November, 1-2 pm

Watch a recording of this seminar here