ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to begin work through some of the implications of a critical rethinking of heritage ecologies through the lens of waste studies, framed within a broader emphasis on the value of such comparative approaches for critical heritage studies. It draws on initial inspiration from geographer Kevin Hetherington’s framing of heritage as a category of both spatial and discursive placing which relates to broader, often cyclical practices of consumption and management of redundancy. The chapter considers how bringing heritage and waste together helps us to retheorise both heritage and waste as forms of material and discursive legacy and to reconsider the ontological implications of living with, caring for and assembling futures out of both more and less persistent traces, residues and materials in the Anthropocene. In 2016, the Heritage Futures research programme ran one of a series of cross-research programme knowledge exchange workshops with SKB, which constituted a kind of extended field-based thought experiment.
