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Towards a Public Architectural History: Collective-Use Facilities and Community Engagement in Portugal and Spain

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Towards a Public Architectural History: Collective-Use Facilities and Community Engagement in Portugal and Spain Authors: Agarez, Ricardo Costa < DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte, Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Av. das Forças Armadas, 1649-026, Lisbon, Portugal>; Pascoal, Ana Mehnert ; Herrera-Pineda, Ivonne Abstract: The sustained use and reuse of existing buildings is key in addressing social inequality and reinforcing sustainability and resilience in peripheral, disadvantaged communities of the so-called developed world. Collective-use facilities built since the 1940s, the outcome of individual and common efforts, carry decades of service to communities and are repositories of both material and experiential values. Knowing their history of production and use is essential in reassessing their relevance for current and future needs: to be effective, this knowledge must be appropriable and relatable, co-created, and widely shared. This article discusses how such premises are put to the test in Arquitectura Aqui, a research and dissemination initiative underway in communities in Portugal and Spain. Using different cases in both countries to examine specific goals and methodologies, challenges and results, we suggest that local engagement in co-researching and co-narrating the past and present of buildings and their role in collective life, in a participation and dissemination platform, might contribute to putting into practice a public architectural history of community buildings.

Conservative Public History: Special Section Introduction

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Conservative Public History: Special Section Introduction Authors: Bauer, Caroline Silveira ; Decker, Tunde ; de Groot, Jerome ; Perry, Jimena

Conservative Public History in India

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Conservative Public History in India Authors: Sharma, Shalini Abstract: This article explores the conservative turn in India’s public history, examining its shift from a pluralistic, regionally grounded tradition to a centralized, ideologically driven narrative under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Since 2014, public history has been increasingly reframed through the lens of Hindutva nationalism, marginalizing minority voices and emphasizing a singular Hindu civilizational past. This “saffronization” is reflected in curriculum reforms, state-sponsored monuments, and the commercialization of heritage. Through examples such as the Ram Mandir, the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, and corporatesponsored heritage sites, the paper shows how historical memory is being curated to support a narrow ideological project. Despite this, pluralist initiatives persist at the community level, including grassroots archives, urban heritage walks, and NGO-supported preservation efforts. These offer critical counter-narratives and underscore the ongoing contestation over India’s past. The paper argues that public history in India has become a terrain of political struggle, where historical representation is deeply entwined with questions of democracy, identity, and power.

Navigating Public History: In Contestation with Japan’s Historical Revisionism

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Navigating Public History: In Contestation with Japan’s Historical Revisionism Authors: Yoshida, Yutaka ; Tozawa, Emi Abstract: In this article, we examine the phenomenon of ‘historical revisionism’ (HR), a movement to construct a ‘bright’ historical narrative of Japan often by denying and minimizing its wrongdoings under Imperial rule, and discuss possible interventions with such narratives through public history. We trace the development of HR, its proponents’ identity as ‘truth-seekers’ and their sentiments, such as victimhood and anti-elitism. We argue that an effective intervention would also require widely building social trust in those professional historians opposing HR by presenting their complex procedure of critical historical research and knowledge so as to ‘immunize’ potential consumers of HR from historical distortions. In times of political contestation over history due to the democratic nature of interpreting history, we suggest shifting away from the common Japanese debate over whether to share academic historians’ ‘authority’ or risk relativism that enables HR, and moving towards a collaborative approach where diverse participants including academic historians share the commitment to interpretive rigor, thereby countering HR.