A Critical Study of Training in the Field of Heritage
Deadline for submission of proposed contributions: September 15, 2025
Plan
Special issue editors (scientific coordination):
Call for proposals
General framework and issues considered
Axis 1 – In Situ: training in the right place at the right time
Axis 2 – Into the heart of heritage training
Axis 3 – Trials as revelations, self-celebratory narratives examined
Contribution proposals (abstracts)
Special issue editors (scientific coordination):
Christian Hottin : conservateur en chef du patrimoine, direction générale des Patrimoines et de l’Architecture, membre du CTHS, membre associé d’Héritages (UMR 9022)
Gaspard Salatko : enseignant statutaire en sciences sociales à l’École supérieure d’art d’Avignon, membre du projet ANR « Sacralités par destination. Mises en récits et mises en scène des matérialités de Notre-Dame de Paris – SACRADE »
Michelle L. Stefano : Folklife Specialist, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress; adjunct professor, Cultural Heritage Management Master’s Program, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC
Call for proposals
This call for contributions invites attention to institutions and programs which, through training, contribute to the development of authorized discourses on heritage. Authorized discourses and views on heritage are expressed in a variety of ways. They are enshrined in international and national legislation and policy, and are promoted and staged by museums and institutions for the conservation of sites and monuments, among others. They are also at the heart of knowledge transmission processes that organize the permanence or variation of the right ways of saying, seeing, or doing heritage. A critical analysis of these mechanisms must therefore include a study of the institutions of higher education that help train future professionals in the field: What grammars of heritage are taught? How, and by whom, are the modalities of its treatment defined, and according to what horizons of expectations, as well as for what purposes and audiences?
In the last decades of the 20th century, as heritage became a category of public action defined in significant part by international standards, and as an economic resource in line with the growth of mass tourism, training in heritage professions – either at the university level or in specialized schools that had long been exclusive and/or elitist – became increasingly widespread. At the time they were founded, these courses were strongly rooted in the ways in which higher education was organized via different national traditions. Like all university programs, they have recently undergone a process of codification, standardization, and normalization that, while making them more easily comparable, also encourages their promoters to diversify and certify them: the challenge now, in a global context of increased competition between universities, is to make their programs more attractive.
For teachers and students alike, these training courses are places where discourses on heritage are demarcated, structured, and standardized, although sometimes tinged with different national traditions and influences. Students are familiarized with the economic and professional environment of their chosen field. And, with the support provided by professionals from heritage establishments, as teachers or internship tutors, they also lay the foundations for their own network of professional contacts.
Furthermore, although varying from country to country, these training courses are linked to research institutions of all disciplinary horizons that have contributed, over the same period, to establishing heritage as an object of academic study. As a result, a social sciences perspective on heritage training requires us to abandon – at least for a moment – the presumed universalist aims of authorized heritage discourses and outlook, and to approach these processes from a casuistic angle, attentive to the local contexts that organize the transmission of professional discourse, gestures, and outlooks.
General framework and issues considered
The issue brings needed attention to the critical study of wide-ranging programs in institutions of higher education dedicated to training future scholars and professionals in the cultural heritage discipline and sector. Contributions can shed critical light on the following perspectives, among others, in relation to the initial establishment, development, and/or continued facilitation (and modification) of heritage training programs over time:
- Political contexts and influences, whether at international, national, or more local levels;
- Historical contexts and influences;
- Disciplinary contexts and influences, including foundational theories and/or scholarship used;
- Geographical, including increasingly global, contexts and influences;
- Components of programs, such as curricula, methodologies, skills taught, and expected learning outcomes;
- The balance between theory and practice, and the practical or ‘applied’ emphasis of instruction and student placement in the sector;
- Current challenges and related effects, including economic pressures; and
- Commemorative discourses and activities pertaining to certain longstanding institutions and programs.
The following outlines thematic axes within which contributions can fall.
Axis 1 – In Situ: training in the right place at the right time
In particular, the issue seeks to examine the circumstances that led to the creation of training courses dedicated to heritage professions and scholarship, with all possible variations in scale and influence. As such, we welcome contributions that explore the development of such training and heritage programs from a political perspective, such as with the emergence of the earliest formations in a global framework that saw the affirmation of nation-states in fierce competition with one another, both in Europe and in their colonial expansion territories.
Moreover, examinations can focus on the scientific context, such as in relation to disciplinary influences, including prominent theorization or discourse, at the time of program establishment, including art history, archaeology, ethnology, and museology, as examples. Similarly, examinations may explore disciplinary influences in how programs may have developed (or changed) over time, such as with respect to related advancements in law or economics, as well as in the hard sciences. In addition, contributions may also shed light on the gradual affirmation of allied disciplines that were intended to be both techniques for treating (e.g. conserving and preserving) certain categories of cultural property and fields of research and work in their own right, such as museum studies, archival theory and practice, library science, and later ‘heritage studies’ or ‘heritage sciences’ (defined less by their own methodology than by their object). Indeed, particular attention may be paid to the role that the teaching of museology has played – in France and elsewhere – in preceding and, in a way, paving the way for heritage studies over the past several decades.
Finally, the geopolitical context and associated influences may also be the focus of examinations. For instance, needed are analyses of the strategies for establishing programs on a global scale and with a global scope, where in the past certain institutions were established during periods of colonial/imperial domination, and more recently, they may be subject to market competition between universities, including via the growth of online (virtual) degree-granting or certification programs. Relatedly, examinations may concentrate on the impact of international heritage policies, such as promoted by UNESCO, on the organization and content of teaching.
From this angle, raised are also debates on the search for the most appropriate positioning for these programs and courses: are universities most suitable, or should they be as close as possible to curatorial and other heritage conservation, preservation, and dissemination institutions (e.g. operating from within them)? On a similar note, important questions are also raised on the circulation of knowledge, of those who transmit it and those who receive it, among and between training programs and other heritage institutions, organizations, and centers of activity.
Axis 2 – Into the heart of heritage training
Of equal importance are analyses that delve into the heart of heritage training schemes to examine their operation and various components. Aspects of heritage programs include:
the methods used to select students, such as in terms of the skill level required, the learning outcomes expected, and the ways in which they are assessed;
their curricula, such as the disciplines drawn on and taught and the exercises considered for their canonical value (e.g. engagement with certain scholarship, condition reports);
the balance between theory and practice, with particular attention paid to the question of internships, and the place given to scientific research in the course of training; and
the conditions under which students enter the job market, and any follow-up carried out by the institution about their career development and working life.
Indeed, among the most characteristic features of many of courses are their ‘practical’ or ‘applied’ approaches to studying and working within the heritage sector in various capacities, as well as the desire of those in charge to pass on managerial skills to students. Here, questions are raised on how, and to what extent, do managerial discourses and practices influence the way in which these courses, historically rooted in the humanities, are designed and delivered?
Moreover, particular attention can be paid to the material conditions for acquiring and transmitting heritage knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills, such as the location of teaching facilities, layout of workshops, laboratories, documentation centers, development of distance learning opportunities. Furthermore, the examination of small ‘workshops’ – e.g. field schools and other intensive, short courses – involved in the production of heritage discourse should extend to their integration in political, administrative, and academic networks, as well as at national and international levels.
Axis 3 – Trials as revelations, self-celebratory narratives examined
Times of great economic, political, and social challenge, as we are in now, can also provide valuable opportunities to analyze the identity of an institution or social group. In the case of heritage training, programs, and courses, we are thinking in particular of: jurisdictional conflicts between professions operating in the same sector, but linked to different training courses; administrative reforms that have the direct or indirect effect of devaluing certain diplomas in relation to others; recruitment or job market crises, of which the reasons can be multiple; or even relocation of programs, which are often the result of material constraints that have become weakening factors, but that always constitute moments of great institutional stress.
In particular, we welcome examinations on issues and developments in the wake of the 2020 pandemic, as well as the development of online heritage programs over recent decades. What impact are these having on the heritage training market? Such studies reveal the evolution of training programs in a higher education sector that is increasingly subject to competitive pressures: upward or downward trajectories; crises overcome at the cost of mergers; and conquest of new markets, among others.
As for the oldest and most recognized heritage training programs, including those that have spanned centuries, they too are entering the age of commemoration. It is in this occasion that the historical narratives of celebration are produced, often with rigor but not always with distance. Just as in times of hardship, these moments of self-celebration – from which, as a matter of principle, all forms of tension must be absent, so as to not spoil the party – should be questioned: what narratives of origin are being put forth and taking center stage? Which figures are particularly celebrated, and who is forgotten? How and where do we celebrate, and where are the blind spots and skeletons in the closet?
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By exploring these different axes, this issue of In situ au regard des sciences sociales will examine how each heritage training program responds to the question, “What does it mean to be a school?”, with original answers, drawing on founding narratives, continuities and also points of rupture in relation to the universalist aims of what ‘heritage’ is or what should be passed on. In this respect, it’s important to emphasize that a call for papers on the history of sociology of heritage training will, almost necessarily for many potential respondents, include a dimension of self-analysis, both reflexive and critical. Similarly, dialogue between researchers and heritage professionals can be a fruitful avenue for research, as long as the pitfall of ‘feedback’ is avoided. International openness is encouraged when responding to this call, as is a comparative approach between training courses in different countries. Cross-cutting thematic approaches are preferred; however, case studies focusing on a certain school or program, an instructor or groups of instructors, students or groups of current students are also welcome. Contributions may address both initial and continuing training, and the relationships between the two.
Contribution proposals (abstracts)
The journal of the Ministry of Culture of France, In situ au regard des sciences sociales (In Situ in the Social Sciences), is seeking contributions to the special issue, A Critical Study of Training in the Field of Heritage, to be published in early 2027.
Abstracts will be subject to a blind review by journal/issue editors and editorial board members, after which authors will be invited to submit the full contribution by March 1, 2026.
500-word abstract deadline: September 15, 2025
If you would like to contribute to this issue, please send an abstract of no more than 500 words, along with a short CV, by September 15, 2025.
By email: insitu.arss@culture.gouv.fr
By mail:
Ministère de la Culture
Direction générale des Patrimoines et de l’Architecture,
Revue In Situ. Au regard des sciences sociales
à l’attention de Nathalie Meyer
182, rue Saint-Honoré
75001 Paris – FRANCE
The texts of the articles corresponding to the selected proposals are expected by March 1, 2026. Texts may be written in French or in a native language. The proposed articles must contain a new contribution of research, hypothesis, or updates; they cannot reproduce the entirety of a text already published.
It will be published in its original version and in its French translation. The length of the articles will be between 3000-7000 words, including notes and bibliography (references cited).
Guidelines for authors regarding the number of pages, illustrations, the inclusion of notes and links, etc., are available on the journal’s website:
https://journals.openedition.org/insituarss/310
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