A cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities

Abstract

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the 'creative city' phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a 'cultural justice approach' can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities-Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UKwe analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.

Ketch Yorlye Daun Paradise: Sense of place, heritage and belonging in Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area

“…The project also explores the politics, policies and processes related to KAVHA’s heritage management and site interpretation. Underpinned by a ‘cultural justice’ lens (Cantillon et al, 2021), the project pays specific attention to how cultural injustices – including underrepresentation, disrespect and nonrecognition – are reinforced or resisted in KAVHA. Data collection for this project involves unstructured and semi-structured interviews with residents and other key stakeholders, as well as using zine-making as an arts-based method to collect data while creating co-produced public history outputs.…”

Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Justice and the Deindustrialising City

“…74-5, original emphasis). The most substantive work on heritage and cultural justice stems from our own researchoften in collaboration with Paul Long, Lauren Istvandity and Jez Collinson popular music heritage (Cantillon et al, 2021a(Cantillon et al, , 2021bLong et al, 2017Long et al, , 2019. The outputs by colleagues (2017, 2019) focus primarily on community archives of popular music, using cultural justice to refer to processes by which we can do justice to culturespecifically, recognising the value of popular music history, which has often been trivialised within authorised heritage institutions and discourses.…”

“…The outputs by colleagues (2017, 2019) focus primarily on community archives of popular music, using cultural justice to refer to processes by which we can do justice to culturespecifically, recognising the value of popular music history, which has often been trivialised within authorised heritage institutions and discourses. Drawing on Banerjee and Steinberg's (2015) toolkit, our most recent work explored the relationship of each of the three tools to examples of popular music heritage initiatives in deindustrialising cities (Cantillon et al, 2021a). In doing so, we reframed the tools of cultural justice as: (1) collection, preservation and archiving; (2) curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and (3) mobilising communities for collective action.…”

A economia cultural do patrimônio da música popular

“…Como o escopo internacional de simpósios e de generosas coleções agora atestam, este é um campo de variedade global (Baker, Strong et al, 2018). O significado de grande parte desse desenvolvimento é capturado na denominação justiça cultural (Cantillon et al, 2021;Long, Baker et al, 2017). Presumivelmente uma forma de compreender a formação e o conteúdo dos arquivos dedicados à música popular, tal terminologia se refere ao tratamento respeitoso desses arquivos, em consonância com os gostos populares, assim como os objetivos justos e adequados de tal preservação, significativos para a memória cultural, para a história e para o patrimônio.…”

“…Antes de traçar algumas conclusões gerais, capazes de responder à minha questão inicial, a penúltima seção elabora um ponto de vista crítico sobre esse campo. Enquanto há muito a celebrar no que se refere ao advento dessa forma de patrimônio como uma expressão de "justiça cultural" (Cantillon et al, 2021), é possível avaliar como também algumas das desigualdades das culturas da música popular continuam sendo reproduzidas.…”