The article presents the findings of a study conducted between 2022 and 2025 with 32 collectives and initiatives, most of them led by Afro-descendant migrant women based in Santiago, Chile. It outlines a methodological design centred on the co-production of spaces in which communities could act and reflect on their heritage. The study identifies the discourses, imaginaries, and practices through which these communities reconstruct their heritage and examines how these observations challenge contemporary heritage theory. It contrasts the results with current approaches—performance based perspectives, assemblages, and interactional frameworks—and proposes incorporating a heritage perspective focused on processes of deracialisation. Deracialisation is understood as a guiding thread in the construction of meaning within the heritage discourses, imaginaries, and practices observed. The article offers a complementary definition of heritage as “an affective and healing association oriented towards decorporealising colonial memory and corporealising new emancipated, deracialised identities.”

The Edwin Fox Maritime Museum is centred on the Edwin Fox, a ship built in Calcutta in 1853. In many respects, the ship is emblematic of British colonialism. Constructed in India toward the end of East India Company control, she transported goods and people across the globe.
Within the New Zealand context, some of her significance lies in the four migrant voyages she undertook in the 1870s and early 1880s. For the families of these migrants, the Edwin Fox can become part of their identity as New Zealanders.
As awareness of the impacts of colonialism and migration grows, the museum faces the challenge of interpreting the ship’s increasingly complex and contested histories. Rather than offering definitive answers, this paper outlines current thinking on presenting the Edwin Fox’s multiple identities while acknowledging her significance in personal family histories.

While unusual, the story of how more than 700 Polish children survived Russian Gulags and a horrific journey to Iran and their subsequent resettlement in a rural New Zealand town during WW2 serves as typical museum fare. However; the reception the children received and the strenuous efforts the community made to ensure they retained their Polish heritage is remarkable. The story has become intergenerational, as their children and grandchildren make a pilgrimage to the site of the camp that was their first New Zealand home. Equally remarkable is the way in which the town has ensured that the story is not forgotten, with full community participation at significant anniversaries and local schools including the story in their curriculum.

This presentation challenges the homogeneous national narrative of the early Irish Free State (1922-1949) by excavating the silenced histories of Jewish, Traveller, and immigrant residents in Galway. Drawing from the “Beyond the Pale” project, it employs a mixed-methods approach to explore how these communities navigated belonging and exclusion. Framed by the conference theme of Tūhono (to connect), it demonstrates how official heritage practices disconnected people from the past. Conversely, it highlights how sharing recovered narratives through community workshops acts as an applied public heritage intervention. This work actively weaves marginalised threads back into the social fabric, connecting critical theory with decolonising practice. It offers global insights for fostering inclusive memory and ethical relationships with contested heritage identity.