Far-right movements increasingly mobilise heritage—places, memories, traditions, and material culture—to legitimise neo-nationalist ideologies amid uncertainty and social change. This paper conceptualises extremism not as a fixed ideology but as a dynamic, relational heritage-making process shaped by historical trauma, colonial afterlives, and contemporary crises. Drawing on comparative case studies from Australia and Germany, it examines two contrasting bottom-up heritage formations: “eshay nationalism” linked to the National Socialist Network, and Wasted in Jarmen, a counter-heritage festival resisting far-right politics. While politically opposed, both cases reveal how affective, embodied, and spatial heritage practices negotiate belonging, exclusion, and alternative futures.

The postsocialist transformation of heritage in Czechia following the political change of 1989 was profound but non-linear. From a critical heritage perspective, this paper understands heritage as a relational process shaped by interactions among institutions, communities, and places. Restitution, privatization, and institutional reforms reconfigured heritage governance away from a centralized socialist model toward more decentralized and expert-driven frameworks, marked by uneven public participation.

The paper focuses on the Czech borderlands, particularly the Sudetenland, as a historically marginal and politically sensitive region where these dynamics are especially visible. It examines selective forgetting and strategic silencing of socialist-era sites, the privileging of pre-socialist pasts, and the impact of Europeanization and transnational heritage frameworks. The analysis also highlights the growing role of grassroots initiatives that challenge official narratives and gradually become part of local heritage practices, demonstrating the fundamentally relational character of heritage-making in postsocialist borderland contexts.

This presentation introduces ways of imagining heritage as future-oriented through the concepts of hope and potentiality. The future is today increasingly being described in dystopian terms, related to a complex set of global crises that are facing humanity. In these times, the capacity to take a proactive stand towards more hopeful futures – even when those futures may seem beyond all likelihood – is more needed than ever. With this realization as a starting point, I attempt to develop a way of conceptualising heritage that is focused on how it can serve as a vehicle to imagine and move towards hopeful futures, drawing upon novelty and the possibility of radical change. I argue that through attempts of redeeming past potentials, heritage can stimulate actions towards hopeful futures. Even when past potentials can never be fully realized, the partial realization tends to breed new hope.

This paper examines Hong Kong’s squatter settlements to explore how heritage is produced and reshaped within changing social relations. Excluded from formal planning and authorized heritage discourse, these “marginal heritage” sites reveal how heritage emerges within asymmetrical power relations and links to identity, community cohesion, and social justice. The paper proposes “visibility dynamics” as an analytical lens, showing how heritage is formed through selective seeing, highlighting, and concealing via material environments, everyday practices, narratives, and policies. These dynamics continually reconstruct heritage meanings, fostering identity while generating exclusion. By framing heritage as a dynamic relational process, the study shows how squatter settlement heritage is interwoven with everyday life and unequal relations, foregrounding visibility, everydayness, and relationality for critical heritage studies.