This paper explores the relationship between heritage institutions, traditional boatbuilders, and the natural environment. Traditional wooden boatbuilding is a deeply relational practice, connecting island communities to the environment (sea, forest) and the past. As an intangible cultural heritage (ICH) item, it faces growing threats from modernity, particularly fibreglass boats and industrial-scale fisheries. While heritage institutions increasingly focus on safeguarding ICH, many are disconnected from the natural environments that shape these practices.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Syros, Greece, and Shetland, UK, this paper presents the voices of boatbuilders on the verge of extinction. Thematic analysis of interviews and field notes reveals the deep natural knowledge at risk, as well as the barriers and potential opportunities of collaborating with heritage institutions.

This paper advocates for safeguarding practices that prioritise long-term sustainability, the nature-culture connection, and continued practice in the community, ensuring the preservation of both craft and environment.

The paper explores through participatory theatre making practices the heritage values assigned to historic urban environments. We focus on Dagenham East Village, a deprived East London area, which has been going through rapid re-development. Working in partnership with residents, the local authority and a theatre company, we unfolded the ways in which residents connect with what they recognise as their local heritage, and how these recognitions reflect on broader dynamics of belonging, displacement, memory and change. Our approach demonstrates the powerful role of performing arts in co-creating sustainable urban heritage futures of social, interrogating whose voices, memories and futures shape current heritage narratives. Positioning theatre-making as both a research method and a critical heritage practice, we contribute to ongoing debates in Critical Heritage Studies around co-production, democratizing heritage knowledge, and the politics of representation.
The paper aligns with the ‘Sustainable Heritage Futures’ sub-theme of the conference.

What are the radical imaginary uses of working-class heritage for contemporary political consciousness, action and solidarity? My research convenes participatory, sociological and critical heritage epistemologies to examine how collaboration and co-production can support democratic, beneficial and emancipatory heritage practices. I explore how these approaches support cultural, social and political meaning-making within contemporary working-class heritage contexts.
I facilitate a participatory youth project at the Working Class Movement Library exploring how to foster and empower critical, political and class consciousness in young audiences. We are (‘co-’)producing a creative intervention in response to the collection as an act of participatory heritage. By bringing historical working class struggles into dialogue with young people’s contemporary concerns, the project challenges a temporally linear heritage. Instead, the WCML becomes a living archive that is democratic and collaborative, prompting the question: how can working class heritage help us reimagine the present and shape more equitable heritage futures?

This paper explores how walking practices reconfigure relationships with the past among local people through a case study of the Lycian Way trekking route along the Mediterranean coast of Türkiye. The Lycian Way is not a single historic footpath but a route established in the late 1990s by connecting ancient Lycian ruins with old roads, including ancient Roman roads and abandoned mountain trails. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines how local people mobilise walking on this trekking route as part of tourism-related events, and shows that walking along the Lycian Way does not simply function as a practice of transmitting or recovering local memories of past practices. Rather, it connects these memories with a seemingly different past, that of ancient Lycia. It suggests that heterogeneous pasts are brought together through walking, producing a relational space where different histories are held together and oriented toward the future.