The Analysis
Complexity explained. A take on large issues from different perspectives.
The Visitor Experience: Adapting in Post-Covid World
The heritage and tourism industry has suffered in numerous ways due to the Covid pandemic currently prevalent in our world. When we think about the relationship between heritage sites and consumers who are eager to explore history and heritage, this has naturally been subject to change during these challenging times. Ensuring that collections, artefacts and displays are appreciated, and that the heritage is valued by the visitor is key for a successful visitor experience (Wallace, 2017, p. 3) and this coupled with the new safety precautions, is what all heritage sites are attempting to balance. As a researcher, I have visited different heritage sites and experienced how they have adapted to the current circumstances where social distancing, improved hygiene practices and safety precautions have been put in place. One heritage site of note is New Lanark, where I have also had the privilege of working for the past year on a part-time basis. Awarded World Heritage Site (WHS) status in 2001, New Lanark celebrates the industrial history of Scotland through a Visitor Attraction Centre and various other tourist facilities such as a hotel, café and shop. It can be found alongside the River Clyde, between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The purposes of this WHS are summarised below (New Lanark, 2020): Conserve the site’s heritage, site and environs, Contribute socially and economically to the area, Evolve to stay relevant to our people and the world. As the Covid pandemic has swept through the country, New Lanark has attempted to balance the consumer needs and wants with government restrictions and guidelines to ensure a safe, enjoyable and informative visit to the site. Arguably, this is in keeping with the above purposes of the site. With the visitor experience already being widely recognised in literature as a ‘multidimensional and complex’ learning environment with varying perspectives (Packer and Ballantyne, 2016, p. 129), adding necessary safety precautions into the mix has created many challenges which have required urgent solutions. Using online platforms such as social media to further promote heritage and history has enabled New Lanark to reach various target audiences and promote the visibility of the site. A new socially-distanced exhibition entitled ‘A Tenement Through Time’ has also been opened to the public, where the consumer can learn how people lived through their words, lives and wallpapers. Despite these successful promotions of history and heritage, New Lanark has been unable to fully open its doors to tourists which is sadly the reality for a great number of heritage sites. Thus, we ask ourselves… How long can this be sustained? The temptation to think negatively of such circumstances is to be expected but perhaps when...
Why is history never set in stone?
July 13th, 2013 a socio-political movement took off across the United States of America. In the aftermath of a controversial judicial decision to acquit Officer George Zimmerman, in the shooting of 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin, people took to social media platforms with the simple yet powerful statement: #BlackLivesMatter. Momentum gained across the next several years, with demonstrations against police brutality and civil rights violations, the movement was formalised as Black Lives Matter (BLM). Then in 2020, the unlawful death of George Floyd by police reignited the movement not only in America, but across the globe. The movement gathered between 15 to 26 million people in USA, becoming one of the largest movements in United States’ history. Then BLM has seen ramifications and support across the globe and stirred a new stand in the UK. By June 2020, BLM protesters in Bristol dislodged a public sculpture of Edward Colston, a philanthropist who also had connections to the slave trade, and pushed it into a nearby river. Why did the BLM movement shift from protesting police brutality in contemporary society to the destruction of historical figures in public spaces? If there is one thing we all rely on without necessarily giving it much credit, it is our understanding of the past. In many cases, history represents a core ideological narrative of any given society. It can shape our ways of behaving in any social context and represent the roots of many of our values, traditions and beliefs. The narration of past events represents a fundamental element of the heritage experience, producing meanings and sharing culturally significant values of a nation. Yet we tend to regard history as a fixed immutable asset. We can find comfort in knowing that while our society is constantly evolving, our past lies unchanged. But is this the case? Who wrote the historical records and for what purpose? The old adage ‘history is written by the victors’ has been problematised by the BLM movement and in particular the unquestioned presence of historical figures’ monuments scattered across cities. As the overarching controllers of historical narratives, museums and heritage sites have been actively rethinking past narratives.The heritage scholar Rodney Harrison argues that “heritage is not simply a collection of ‘things’, but instead constitutes the social ‘work’ that individuals and societies undertake to produce the past in the present.” (2013, p.113) In that sense, the BLM movement has certainly challenged the social ‘work’ that past societies created in the commemoration of Edward Colston in public spaces. While it was perhaps an agreed form of narrative in a very different period of time, it might not always reflect the understanding...
Big Data, Big Issues: The Internet and the Perils of Progress
How can we continue to celebrate the opportunities the internet offers without becoming subservient to the increasingly centralised forces that govern it?
Lima's new cooking pot
Lima is considered the gastronomic capital of South America. Cooking and eating have always been national passions in Peru, but the country’s culinary boom invokes a number of issues that go well beyond the simple cooking pot and involve society, economy, and politics. As the story of Maria shows…
Lima’s new cooking pot
Lima is considered the gastronomic capital of South America. Cooking and eating have always been national passions in Peru, but the country’s culinary boom invokes a number of issues that go well beyond the simple cooking pot and involve society, economy, and politics. As the story of Maria shows…
Beggars not wanted: a chronology of the exclusion of ‘poverty immigrants’ in Munich
On 20th of August 2014, the city of Munich enacted a ban on begging in its downtown area with the intention of tackling so-called ‘forced begging’. The ban is, however, primarily targeting and outlawing so-called ‘poverty immigrants’ from Romania and Bulgaria. What kind of exclusionist logics are underlying this ban?
