D4: Heritage Ecologies and Environmental Justice: Power, Care, and Climate Futures
Tracks
4
| Monday, November 30, 2026 |
| 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM |
| RHMZ01 |
Overview
Stream: Climate, Environmental Justice and Resilience
Paper / Session Submitter
Dr Yunci Cai
Associate Professor In Museum And Heritage Studies
University Of Leicester
Heritage Ecologies and Environmental Justice: Power, Care, and Climate Futures
Summary Abstract
This panel examines heritage as a critical site through which struggles for environmental justice are articulated, contested, and enacted in the context of climate change. Drawing on anthropology, critical heritage studies, environmental humanities, and geography, it explores how heritage is embedded within unequal socio-ecological relations shaped by colonial histories, extractive economies, and uneven environmental governance.
Challenging dominant heritage frameworks that prioritise safeguarding and management, the panel foregrounds heritage ecologies: relational assemblages of people, land, water, non-human beings, and practices. From this perspective, heritage is not a passive cultural resource but an active mode of environmental knowledge, responsibility, and resistance. The panel asks what understandings of heritage emerge when environmental justice, rather than preservation alone, is placed at the centre of heritage theory and practice.
Challenging dominant heritage frameworks that prioritise safeguarding and management, the panel foregrounds heritage ecologies: relational assemblages of people, land, water, non-human beings, and practices. From this perspective, heritage is not a passive cultural resource but an active mode of environmental knowledge, responsibility, and resistance. The panel asks what understandings of heritage emerge when environmental justice, rather than preservation alone, is placed at the centre of heritage theory and practice.
Biographies
Yunci Cai is Associate Professor in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. She has research interests in the cultural politics and museologies in and of Asia. She is the author of Staging Indigenous Heritage (Routledge 2020) and the editor of The Museum in Asia (Routledge 2025).
Roslynn Ang is an educator-scholar in a long-term engagement with the Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai, an intangible cultural heritage performance group dedicated to revitalizing Indigenous Ainu song and dance in Japan. Her research interests include performance and media, decolonizing methodology, indigeneity, representations of race and nation, and Japan’s global colonial history.
Yew-Foong Hui is an anthropologist who has led the heritage documentation of two major Chinese cemeteries in Singapore. Among his research interests are Chinese diasporic heritage, digital heritage, and the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage. He is co-editor of Heritage conservation and China's Belt and Road Initiative (Routledge, 2023).
Deniz Ikiz is an Assistant Professor on Heritage and Climate Change in the Department of the Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research interests lie at the intersection of cultural heritage and climate change, and she adopts an inclusive, just, and values-based approach to climate adaptation and risk management.
Anne Veere Fee Hoogbergen is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Heritage and Climate Change in the Department of the Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research investigates the intersections of cultural heritage, climate change, and affect, with an ethnographic focus on lived experiences of climate adaptation.