World Heritage Sites are dynamic, relational spaces, yet often marginalise non-Western epistemologies through exclusive definitions of value. This paper proposes ‘Participatory Heritage Interpretation’ (PHI) as a restorative practice to weave diverse worldviews into heritage education. Based on fieldwork with 25 refugee participants across four Scottish World Heritage Sites, this research introduces the ‘Worldview-Oriented Heritage Education’ (WOHE) framework. This pedagogical innovation fosters integration through four relational phases: welcoming diverse worldviews, exploring information, connecting learning to worldviews, and co-creating new values through creative interventions. Theoretically, the study reconceptualises sites as catalysts for meaning-making rather than static repositories. Methodologically, it offers PHI as an actionable, resource-efficient alternative to traditional PAR. Ultimately, by shifting focus from authorised discourse to intercultural conversation, the research demonstrates how heritage education can function as epistemic justice, facilitating a deep connection between displaced people and new communities.

This paper examines a corpus of anthropometric photographs of Koreans held by the Government-General Museum during Japan’s colonial occupation (1910–1945), later transferred to the National Museum of Korea, with attention to their digitisation in 2019. Rather than treating these images solely as documentary records of material culture, the paper argues for an art historical approach that reactivates their visual and epistemic complexity within critical heritage studies. Drawing on Maki Fukuoka’s concept of shashin, it situates photography within East Asian visual epistemologies shaped by specimen-based knowledge systems, complicating Euro-American frameworks of photographic objectivity. Attending to compositional strategies, visual “noise,” and affective residues, the paper reveals how seemingly neutral heritage images contain subtle disruptions that resist imperial visual order. By foregrounding visuality as a contested site of meaning, it demonstrates how art history can broaden heritage discourse beyond materiality and normative aesthetic standards.

In 2006, the post-graduate Museum and Heritage Studies class ‘MHST 511: Introducing Museums and Heritage’ at Victoria University of Wellington brought together 14 postgraduate students to explore the history, theory and practice of museums and heritage in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Two decades on and the 2006 cohort were surveyed and interviewed, with the purpose of reflecting critically on the role this class has played in their professional development and subsequent careers.

The research results are analysed and presented in this paper, which aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly conversation on reflexive practice and the importance of looking back to look forward (Witcomb & Buckley 2013; Schofield 2014; Ireland & Blair 2015; Hølleland & Skrede 2019).

This paper explores the dynamics of “re-contextualization of knowledge” within prehistoric archaeological sites characterized by uncertainty and invisibility. Focusing on the Goshono Jomon Site, a component property of the UNESCO World Heritage “Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan,” it analyzes how volunteer guides mediate the interface between Authorized Heritage Discourse and visitors’ sensory experiences.

Recent guide studies reframe guides as mediators who foster emotional and physical connections, translating archaeological knowledge through multi-dimensional value-making practices. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation, the paper examines how guides mobilize personal histories and embodied metaphors to render abstract knowledge experientially meaningful.

By foregrounding the “unknown” of prehistory and framing interpretive “voids” as dialogical resources, these interactions destabilize expert–lay hierarchies and enable pluralistic, co-created engagements with the “invisible” past.