1st CHARTER Meetup: How Can We Describe Working In The Cultural Heritage Sector?
The CHARTER Alliance, of which ICOMOS is a full partner, is releasing a new series of events, the CHARTER Meetups, aiming to foster exchange between cultural heritage actors to co-create solutions for the cultural heritage sector. The first CHARTER Meetup will take place on 10 March and will focus on the CHARTER model for CH and future challenges for research. The first encounter will promote discussion and exchange around the question "How can we describe working in the cultural heritage sector?"
The speakers for the first CHARTER Meetup, Susan Corr (The Heritage Council) and Bosse Lagerqvist (ICOMOS), commented about the programme:
"The Faro Convention frames the understanding of cultural heritage in the CHARTER project. The emphasis on ‘people’ in the identification with those resources inherited from the past, has the effect of democratising heritage and its practice, liberating it from the preserve of experts and heritage practitioners as the ‘custodians of heritage for future generations’.
Heritage is publicly authored and publicly owned; we as people confer value notwithstanding the development of heritage theory, principles and ethics; the intellectual canon which mediates ‘professional practice’.
The challenge for CHARTER is not only to reflect this phenomenological approach to heritage in the ways or processes whereby meaning or value is conferred but CHARTER must also demonstrate the mechanism that allows this to happen.
Heritage counts through the realisation of its value for society and this in turns drives economic activity. In the graphic that we have proposed, we are suggesting that authoring heritage and owning heritage constitute the same start point and end point where both are functions of public participation.
CHARTER suggests that a circular dynamic occurs between these points across a range of key activities as these serve to recognise and amplify the value of cultural heritage to society in a self-sustaining eco system driven by public engagement.
Our challenge in CHARTER Working Package 2 right now is how to describe the different practices within the heritage area in a conceptual manner. Based on that we intend to define the key skills and knowledge related to each concept, but also generic skills of importance for the whole sector.
The present system of European Skills/Competences, qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) does not justify the broad area of cultural heritage professions as a comprehensive sector of economic importance. The WP2 has therefore initiated a close collaboration with ESCO to find means for improving the situation, and an important starting point is the concepts of different heritage occupations, broadly framed within contemporary and future societal challenges."
Register here
Learn more about the programme here
Meet the speakers here
See more
Video: 2 minutes to understand the CHARTER project
Launch of CHARTER Alliance to unite and professionalise the European cultural heritage sector