Un-authorised View: Leveraging Volunteer Expertise in Heritage

Abstract

Volunteers are an underused but important resource in presenting plural heritages within large heritage organizations. We report on a qualitative study at a heritage site in the UK which combined explorations of volunteers' practice and digital design. The study comprised of observational fieldwork with co-creative activities across eight linked workshops, where we explored the site with volunteers, and how we might leverage existing working structures to make new design prototypes. Our collective account contributes new insights on working with volunteers and the opportunities that arise from acknowledging them as genius locirecognising them as experts of their own experience and capturing and supporting their skills as storytellers. Working with the volunteering staff in a codesign process we created innovative designs including our Un-authorised View, which draws out the unique perspectives and the personal stories at heritage destinations.

Exploring Participants’ Representations and Shifting Sensitivities in a Hackathon for Dementia

“…As teams gained insight into the experiences of people with dementia, Garden Life described being motivated by a desire to continue to deepen [an] understanding of these issues in hope to help to alleviate the stigma that contributes to misrepresentations of dementia. Furthermore, while we described the prize money hindered the sharing of resources and knowledge between teams during our event, the two winning teams did use that money for initial exploratory studies whether that was in a dementia care home, or for Chatter Bench who trialled their prototype technology within a heritage setting [119]. While prize money was a strong incentive to spark people s interest, it was apparent from our findings that multiple teams had additional pro-social motivations for spending their weekend hacking away together.…”

Storytelling in heritage tourism: an exploration of co-creative experiences from a tourist perspective

“…Ross & Saxena, 2019). Moreover, most studies that address this topic do so from the perspective of the experience provider (Baker et al, 2016;Katifori et al, 2018;Katifori, Tsitou, et al, 2020;Tsenova et al, 2020;Wilson & Desha, 2016), leaving the perspective of the heritage tourist largely underexplored.…”

Towards Critical Heritage in the wild: Analysing Discomfort through Collaborative Autoethnography

“…In opposition to AHD, perspectives to understand heritage have emerged that focus on non-western conceptualisations or that value sub-national or community voices, creating bottom-up approaches to heritage [115]. Tsenova et al [126] explores a bridge between AHD and community voices by casting volunteers in heritage sites as genius loci, experts in their own experience and the 'spirit of place'/authenticity but not authorised by institutions. Plural heritages [110] stand against AHD by legitimatising all heritages since having an AHD's institutionalised narrative invalidates all others.…”