ABSTRACT
This paper argues for and enacts new ways of doing heritage studies in response to the understanding of heritage as process (Smith 2006, 2011). It does this through the particular challenge of researching performance and events. As a step towards new ways of doing heritage studies, my approach begins by taking responsibility for the positionality of the researcher and the situatedness of the research produced. In so doing, I take forward aspects of non-representational
of Heritage Studies 761
theory (NRT) (Anderson and Harrison 2010b; Thrift 1996, 2004, 2008) through three ‘brief encounters’. Here, questions of situation and research as performance are foregrounded to focus attention on the affective and embodied actions and practices of heritage studies. This leads to experimentation with the forms and expressive registers of presentation that aspire to be more-than-representational (Lorimer 2005). It is hoped that from this engagement and enactment, new insights and perspectives might be generated towards alternative ways of doing heritage studies that respond to heritage as process and to the field’s ability to research performance and events more broadly.1 At the level of this paper, these ideas are performed by locating and entangling my argument within an episodic (re)enactment of the Lord Mayor’s Show, a hybrid form of commemoration, reenactment and live interpretation.
