ABSTRACT
Preservation practice and the Public Humanities have large areas of overlap, and these synchronicities are growing as preservation becomes more interpretive, more interdisciplinary, more experimental, more participatory, and more engaged with social and political issues as they relate to place—and as the “spatial turn” within the humanities has centered the study and use of place. As the field changes, we need to develop new theories and methodologies for doing more engaged, community-centered preservation work that is informed by museum and library practice, public history, contemporary art, and community activism. This essay argues that preservation is at a pivotal point of transformation, that the disciplinary borders of the field are shifting, and that deep structural change within the field is required in its practice, curriculum, and culture. It suggests that the expanding transdisciplinary “field” of the Public Humanities—which links critical thinking and creative practice in the humanities with public engagement and community co-creation—provides a model for this new preservation practice. The essay concludes with reflections about a “preservation happening” that the author organized in 2017 with colleagues in Providence to mark the demolition of the city’s most significant Brutalist building, the John E. Fogarty Memorial Building, built in 1967.
