This paper draws on qualitative research conducted for the Integrating Lifetimes in Heritage Capital (ITHACA) project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the United Kingdom. It will examine how museum objects mediate relationships between past, present, and future through contested understandings of value, damage, and care. Focusing on stakeholder perceptions of unacceptable damage, the paper explores how decisions about conservation, use, and access actively shape the imagined and material futures of heritage objects and eventually their perceived lifetime. The findings demonstrate how heritage management decisions function as future-oriented acts, embedding assumptions about durability, risk, responsibility, and legacy confirming that object lifetimes are negotiated, dynamic, and socially situated. These empirical insights allow for a reflection on heritage objects as active connectors between pasts, presents, and multiple possible futures.

This paper presents ongoing research into community-led collecting and community archiving, developed through a Master of Museum and Heritage Practice project situated within a small university archive. The research explores how archives with limited resources can support communities to document and preserve their own histories, with a particular focus on groups underrepresented within traditional memory institutions. It responds to the challenges of collecting contemporary communities that primarily exist online, an intervention to capture digital histories before they are lost, reformatted, or erased by social media platforms. Central to the project is the negotiation between institutional capacity and community needs, aiming to create adaptable, low-resource tools for collaborative archiving. The research is framed by Michelle Caswell’s five principles from community archives discourses: participation, shared stewardship, multiplicity, archival activism, and reflexivity. Foregrounding Caswell’s assertion that, “archival collecting is not only about preserving traces of the past, but envisioning a new future.”

This presentation will explore the heritage theme of connecting people with the past, present and future by focusing on the historical journey of a Scottish museum of social work. Established as a private museum within the family home of a former social worker, we will trace its transition to an accredited university museum, and its current status as a collection within the archive of Glasgow Caledonian University. This presentation draws on archival and oral history research to tell the story of Heatherbank Museum of Social Work. Institutional records, historical press releases and interviews with museum stakeholders were analysed, using concepts from assemblage theory, to trace the precarious history of this unique museum exploring how it was carefully assembled, extended and held in place by the efforts of three different curators until it was archived in 2004.The presentation will close with a consideration of possible futures for the former museum.

This study examines how heritage significance is justified in psychiatric-related heritage practice when patient-related evidence is often restricted, addressing the gap between critical discourse and institutional practice through a case study of the Footscray Psychiatric Centre in Victoria, Australia. (FPC)
The FPC’s Statement of Significance reflects a predominantly Authorised Heritage Discourse while omitting former patients’ perspectives, neglecting to interrogate why a community mental health facility was designed in a bunker-like Brutalist style, which embodies the paradox between care and custody in psychiatric histories.
Drawing on archival research and Ireland, Brown, and Schofield’s (2020) concept of (in)significance, the study shows that the assessment’s justification is contestable and highlights the importance of integrating former patients’ perspectives. Recognising these perspectives enhances heritage understanding, fosters inclusive practice, and resonates with contemporary global mental health care. The study advocates a landscape-like approach connecting past, present, and future communities through reconnecting psychiatric-related heritage practices.