Tourism-led development has become a dominant pathway for transforming traditional villages in China, yet its impacts on the social value of heritage remain under-examined. This paper explores how tourism development affects the social value of heritage in Hongcun, a World Heritage-listed traditional village in China. Drawing on a mixed qualitative approach combining ethnography and netnography, the study integrates perspectives from local villagers, tourism practitioners, heritage practitioners, government officials, and tourists. The analysis focuses on how different stakeholders attribute social values to heritage, how tourism reshapes local perceptions and generates value contestations, and how tensions emerge between policy governance and community participation. Conceptualising heritage as a relational process, the paper highlights how tourism-led transformation reconfigures relational heritage spaces and argues for greater recognition of social value and more meaningful community participation in heritage governance.

This paper examines the transmission of Hwanghae shamanic rituals, originating in what is now North Korea and transmitted in South Korea after the peninsula's division, as a case of relational heritage. While institutional heritage frameworks have enabled the continued performance of these rituals in the South, they reduce transmission to the preservation of formalized ritual performances, excluding religious and ontological dimensions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within a Hwanghae ritual preservation association, the paper shows that shamanic heritage is sustained through ongoing relationships with northern spirits enacted through ritual practice. It argues that heritage transmission operates beyond preservation, as a relational process connecting past, present, and future across a divided peninsula.

This paper will reflect on the preliminary findings for the research project ‘Grandparenting in Australia: A history’—specifically the findings arising from the oral histories with migrant-background grandparents, parents, and adult (grand)children who either fulfill a grandparenting role in their family or community, or have experience with grandparenting relationships. The wider project tracks the evolution of grandparenting over the last half century, and in relation to major demographic and social changes, including life expectancy, gender rights, and multiculturalism. The oral histories and life stories I’ll explore in this paper will explore the roles the grandparents play in mediating linguistic, cultural, social and economic differences in multicultural societies and across generations—and the ways in which the narrators position and understand their roles as grandparents.

In Anhui, southern China, female ancestral halls represent a distinctive architectural and social form within village clan systems. Unlike supplementary female spaces elsewhere, Anhui’s female halls were often independent buildings commemorating exemplary women and supporting female rituals and communal life. While physically preserved, their social use has declined due to both historical shifts and contemporary heritage practices that privilege a standardized ancestral hall model. Drawing on critical heritage studies, this paper examines how conservation policies and heritage recognition frameworks marginalize female ancestral halls by overlooking their functional roles and social significance. It highlights the disconnection between material preservation and community engagement, revealing how governance practices shape which ancestral halls are deemed legitimate heritage, thereby sidelining spaces central to women’s participation in village life.