This paper interrogates heritage in postcolonial Pakistan through the critical question of Whose Heritage, examining how colonial architecture, urban planning, and museums in Karachi and Lahore are mobilised to construct national identity. Heritage is positioned as a contested and politicised field shaped by colonial legacies, state ideologies, and elite interests, rather than a neutral inheritance. The postcolonial state repurposes colonial urban forms and monumental histories to legitimise power and sustain a homogenised Islamic national narrative, privileging glorified pasts while marginalising vernacular, plural, and everyday histories. These practices reproduce socio-spatial divisions through segregation, gentrification, and restricted access to heritage sites. By foregrounding heritage as a site of power, memory, and belonging, the paper frames Whose Heritage as a decolonial intervention that exposes historical silences, challenges authorised narratives, and reimagines more inclusive identities and modes of engaging with the past.

Building on the idea that heritage is a social construct, this paper argues that the relevance of memories and legacies for communities lies in the collective practices and spaces of their transmission. It posits that memory is a dynamic process, shaped through collective relational practices that select, negotiate, discard or rehearse memories and legacies. The concept of "commonscapes" is introduced as spaces for the more-than-human (re)production of these memories held in common, taking place within collective events like exhibitions and celebrations where these legacies are reaffirmed or discarded. It emphasizes memory-making as a commoning activity that resides in a non-linear understanding of time, that is place-related and always relationally interdependent to the other and to the environment. Case studies from Galicia (Spain) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) illustrate how more-than-human legacies can be reclaimed as commoncapes for memory-making.

Heritage languages operate as sites of cultural resilience and identity negotiation. This paper examines how Dutch of Chinese Descents (DCD) navigate non-Mandarin Sinitic heritage languages amid pressures from local education policies and China’s promotion of Mandarin as a marker of Chineseness. Drawing on interviews, it analyses how DCDs reclaim these languages as living heritage despite essentialised expectations.
While Mandarin’s rise reflects historical policies subordinating regional varieties to political loyalty, diasporic communities challenge this hierarchy through pragmatic maintenance and cultural hybridity. In the Dutch context, DCDs navigate competing discourses of Dutch integration and China’s monolithic “Han” narrative. Their so-called “dialects” emerge as relational heritage that connects imagined pasts, contested presents, and uncertain futures.
Bridging scholarship on memory and decolonial historiography, this paper reframes heritage languages as context-depended practices of belonging, critiques UNESCO’s treatment of language as a “vehicle,” and addresses gaps in scholarship on intra Sinitic power relations in diaspora context.

Taking place twice within eighteen-year intervals (every eleven and seven years), the Kara ritual is a central pillar of Konso culture that connects the present generation with all of the generations that have come and gone before it. The ritual marks the coming into age and power of every generation, and its subsequent naming. To date, there have been 30 Kara rituals, marking the coming to age of 30 generations, spanning a period of at least 270 years. Through song, dance, oration, commemoration, and performance the past is brought to life in the Kara. However, with evangelical Christianity and state authority increasingly encroaching into the tradition, the future of the Kara is uncertain. This presentation will address the issue of cultural heritage both as the continuity of the past to the present, but at the same time, as the encroachment of the present in to the past.