Preservation as Futures-Making Practices

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 34-51
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Future Orientations

This essay takes the practices of biobanking as a case study in order to redefine and reframe current assumptions about the role, practices, and orientation of heritage. While it is conventional to think about conservation or preservation as a series of practical fields oriented towards preserving and managing what remains of biological and cultural diversity from the past, it is perhaps less often the case that we reflect on the role of heritage in assembling and making futures, despite ubiquitous claims that the aim of such procedures is the preservation of objects, places, and practices for future generations. This essay probes these future orientations to demonstrate that conservation is a series of activities which are intimately concerned with assembling, building, and designing future worlds, and to argue that heritage might be productively reframed as ‘worlding’ or ‘future-making’ practices.

scholarly journals Effects of experiencing the role of imaginary future generations in decision-making: a case study of participatory deliberation in a Japanese town

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keishiro Hara ◽  
Yoko Kitakaji ◽  
Hiroaki Sugino ◽  
Ritsuji Yoshioka ◽  
Hiroyuki Takeda ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Intergenerational Conflict ◽  
Future Generation ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Public Facilities ◽  
Imaginary Future Generation ◽  
Clear Shift

AbstractTo ensure sustainability, overcoming intergenerational conflict is vital, and social systems supporting decision-making that takes into account the benefits to future generations is thus critically important. One promising approach in such social systems is introducing “imaginary future generations” who act as representatives for the benefits of future generation in actual, present-day decision-making situations. In this study, we explore the effects and implications of participants’ experiences as representatives of imaginary future generation. We conducted a citizens’ participatory debate on creating a vision and appropriate policies associated with public facilities and housing in a town in Japan, and examined how the thinking patterns and decisions of the participants shifted as a result of debating from the perspectives of both current and imaginary future generations. Based on analyses of a questionnaire and the keywords in answers to a worksheet provided to the participants, we demonstrate that through their experiences as representatives of imaginary future generations, a clear shift in perspective occurred, with increases in self-reflective viewpoint. We also found that the shared viewpoints of the current and future generations existed within the individuals. These findings hint at how we can develop institutions and social systems that facilitate sustainable decision-making.

scholarly journals The Role of Expert Witnesses in the Adjudication of Religious and Culture-based Asylum Claims in the United Kingdom: the Case Study of ‘Witchcraft’ Persecution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katia Bianchini
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Final Outcome ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Multiple Challenges ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This article examines the role of cultural expertise in asylum judicial decisions in the UK by focusing on witchcraft-based persecution. The case study highlights multiple challenges to decision-making created by religious and cultural diversity, and the ensuing problems of assessing unfamiliar facts and beliefs against the often lack of corroborating evidence. Drawing on legal sources and a small number of anthropological studies, as well as analyses of judicial decisions, the article discusses how the unique characteristics of witchcraft cases, with their unfamiliar paradigms, are illustrative of the need to analyse and understand asylum claims within their broad cultural, historical, economic, and political contexts. The article exposes how cultural expertise assists judges in appreciating specific contexts and curbing their Eurocentric understanding of culture and religion, and shapes the final outcome of cases.

The role of multiplicity in a cult: A case study

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Worrall ◽  
Ann W. Stockman

Endangered Butterflies and their Non-Native Host Plants: Examining Shifting Values of Belonging in Restoration

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert M. Anderson ◽  
Amy M. Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Ecological Restoration ◽  
Native Species ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
A Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
Remote Island ◽  
Scientific Truth ◽  
Native Host

The island marble butterfly (Euchloe ausonides insulanus), thought to be extinct throughout the 20th century until re-discovered on a single remote island in Puget Sound in 1998, has become the focus of a concerted protection effort to prevent its extinction. However, efforts to “restore” island marble habitat conflict with efforts to “restore” the prairie ecosystem where it lives, because of the butterfly’s use of a non-native “weedy” host plant. Through a case study of the island marble project, we examine the practice of ecological restoration as the enactment of particular norms that define which species are understood to belong in the place being restored. We contextualize this case study within ongoing debates over the value of “native” species, indicative of deep-seated uncertainties and anxieties about the role of human intervention to alter or manage landscapes and ecosystems, in the time commonly described as the “Anthropocene.” We interpret the question of “what plants and animals belong in a particular place?” as not a question of scientific truth, but a value-laden construct of environmental management in practice, and we argue for deeper reflexivity on the part of environmental scientists and managers about the social values that inform ecological restoration.

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