Emma Waterton
Leverhulme International Professor & Director of the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre

Profile

Biography

Emma Waterton is a Leverhulme International Professor in the Department of Archaeology, where she directs the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre. Emma’s research is located primarily in the field of heritage studies, where she works to challenge the systems, structures and institutions of power that continue to shape heritage, both in the UK and internationally. She is particularly interested in: the interface between heritage, identity, memory and affect; ​​anti-colonial politics; migrant heritage-making; community engagements with our past/s; and Anthropocene legacies. 

Emma has held academic appointments in both the UK and Australia. She was an RCUK Academic Fellow in Heritage and Public History at Keele University from 2006 to 2010, before moving to Australia to take up a lectureship in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University (WSU) in 2010. During her time at WSU (2010-2022) she held various governance roles, including Academic Group Leader for Heritage and Tourism, Director of Academic Programs for Geography, Tourism and Planning, and Associate Dean (Research) for the School of Social Sciences. Her engagements with a diversity of researchers while at WSU saw her own work expand to include an interest in the analytical shifts animating cultural tourism and political geography, which she has adapted and translated into the field of heritage studies. These shifts include the turn to affect, a return to materialities, emotional geographies, and theories of more-than-human worlds.

Emma is Consulting Editor for the journal Landscape Research, and is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Heritage Studies and the Journal of Heritage Tourism. She is a former Trustee of the Landscape Research Group, a former Council Member, Treasurer and Vice-President of the Geographical Society of New South Wales, and a founding Executive Committee Member of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.

Career

1999: BA, with a double Anthropology major, University of Queensland

2004: MA in Archaeological Heritage Management, University of York

2008: PhD, University of York (AHRC funded)

2006: RCUK Academic Fellowship, Keele University

2010: Lecturer, University of Western Sydney

2013: Senior Lecturer, Western Sydney University

2014: Associate Professor, Western Sydney University

2019: Professor, Western Sydney University

2022: Leverhulme International Professor, University of York

Research

Overview

Emma’s research is organised into four interconnected areas: 

(1): The discourse of heritage and its erasures: A core contribution of Emma’s work has been her articulations of heritage ‘as discourse’, drawing on critical realism and the well-established underpinnings of critical discourse analysis. Arguing for an understanding of heritage ‘as discourse’, she has systematically exposed a range of inadequacies and exclusions in the way heritage is understood and managed at the policy level. 

(2) Heritage encounters and theories of affect: In collaboration with Professor Steve Watson, Emma has been a key voice in the vibrant area of debate that examines the affective and emotional consequences of heritage. Together, they have provided a thorough analysis of the contribution theories of affect can make to our understanding of heritage, pushing debate towards unpacking not only what heritage might mean but what it does and what responses it provokes. 

(3) Experimental approaches: Largely focused on qualitative methods, Emma has made several methodological contributions to her field via the use of critical discourse analysis, Q-methodology, visual analysis, photo-elicitation, multispecies ethnography, autoethnography, and more-than-representational approaches, all of which she has deployed in conjunction with traditional methods such as in-depth interviewing, social surveys and focus groups. 

(4) The intersection between heritage and society: Much of Emma’s research has challenged the dominant, yet simplistic, idea of heritage found in national and international policy, with a view to imagining a more nuanced, just and sustainable understanding of heritage. This has prompted her to conduct research that focuses on community engagement, everyday life, multiculturalism, disasters, more-than-human heritage and issues relating to social justice in a range of contexts, including the UK, Canada, Bermuda, Antigua, Australia, the USA, Spain, Nepal and Mongolia.

Projects

Heritage-Making in the Parramatta LGA, Australia

Funded by the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Scheme and in collaboration with  Professor Denis Bryne, this project explores how recent migrants experience and interact with existing heritage places in Parramatta (Australia) and how they generate heritage places and attachments of their own.  Drawing together the concepts of place-making, heritage-making and homemaking, the project attends to the often small-scale and ephemeral practices migrants use to establish feelings of familiarity, ‘being at home’ and belonging.

Engineering Memory: A Transnational Heritage of the British Empire

Funded by Emma’s Leverhulme International Professorship and in collaboration with Professor Jason Dittmer, this project aims to better understand British colonial heritage and the ways in which it is navigated, mobilised, rejected and/or repurposed. With a focus on UNESCO World Heritage Sites that memorialise the British Empire (in, for example, Bermuda, Antigua, Canada and Australia), this project engages in global comparisons about how such sites are received and understood by professionals, visitors, and their host communities. Mobilising a suite of qualitative methods, it explores the curatorial and affective techniques through which British colonial heritage is engineered, as well as providing valuable insight on its reception in a variety of contexts.

Heritage and Cultural Capital in Contemporary Britain

Funded by Emma’s Leverhulme International Professorship and in collaboration with Dr Tanja Hoffmann, this project seeks to understand how different forms of heritage are engaged in, and engage with, perceptions of social, cultural, and economic inclusion or exclusion in post-Brexit Britain. Taking a lead from the heritage-centred questions developed for the Australian Cultural Fields project (Bennett et al. 2020; Rowe et al. 2018), the project revolves around a national survey that explores knowledge of, tastes for and participation in heritage in Britain and compares how people from different backgrounds feel about, experience and access that heritage.

Previous Projects

Co-Investigator, Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics (ARC Discovery Grant)

Sole-Investigator, Photos of the Past: The Negotiation of Identity and Belonging at Australian Tourism Sites (ARC Discovery Early Career Research Grant)

Co-Investigator, Everyday Geopolitics: Nationalist Subjectivities and ANZAC Thanatourism (UWS IRIS Grant)

Sole-Investigator, Memorialisation and Affect: Remembering Pearl Harbour (UWS Early Career Research Grant)

Sole-Investigator, Overcoming Obsolescence? Museums, Heritage and Identity in the Potteries (British Academy Small Grant)

Co-Investigator, Landscapes of In/Justice at the Port Arthur Historic Site (LRG Anniversary Award)

Supervision

Emma welcomes applications from PhD candidates in the following areas:

• Heritage and social justice
• Heritage, emotion and affect
• Heritage, place, identity
• Commemoration and the politics of memory
• Heritage tourism
• Heritage representations
• Cultural landscapes
• Migrant heritage
• Heritage and the politics of exclusion
• More-than-human heritage
• Heritage and deindustrialisation

Current PhD students:

• Melissa Thomas, Living on the Edge: Precarity and Resilience in the Heritage of Fisherfolk and Fish, co-supervised with Tanja Hoffmann
• Sree Subramanian, Colonial Infrastructures of Circulation, co-supervised with Jason Dittmer
• Niamh Malone, Mobilities, Materialities and Heritage Construction: The Complexity of Movement for Disabled Individuals in Twentieth Century England, co-supervised with John Schofield
• Ben Davenport, Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage: The Role of Food Heritage in the Negotiation of Identity and Belonging among European Migrants to the UK, co-supervised with Hayley Saul
• Owen Hurcum, Trowels, Trenches and ‘#TransRights’: Archaeology as Transgender Activism, co-supervised with Colleen Morgan
• Jianing Wang, The Multiple Heritage Landscapes of the Grand Canal co-supervised with Hayley Saul
• Marie Woods, Breaking the Barrier to Museums, co-supervised with Harald Fredheim
• Michelle Whitmore, The Power of Imagination: Lessons on Waste Management from the Walt Disney Company for Application Across the Travel and Tourism Industry, co-supervised with Felicity Picken (enrolled at WSU)

Completed PhD students:

• Vanessa Whittington, Authenticities, Deficits, ‘Transformations’: Visitor Responses to Aboriginal Cultural Heritage in Australian Protected Areas
• Vanica Arora, Reframing Reconstruction: Trajectories of Built Heritage in Bhaktapur, Nepal after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake
• Clinton Johnston, Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Australian Social History Museums: Assembling Histories, Negotiating the Past
• Utsab Bhattarai, Resilience Building: A Study of Livelihood Management Practices of the Sherpa People in the Khumbu (Everest) Region, Nepal
• Josephine Wong, An Exploration Of The Relationship Between A Semi-Structured Intervention And The Therapeutic Relationship In Art Therapy With Traumatized Children
• Christiane Kuhling, Rewriting Tourist Photography
• Jenny Hall, Women Mountaineers: A Study of Affect, Sensoria and Emotion
• Alanna Kamp, 'Invisible Australians': Chinese Australian Women's Experiences of Belonging and Exclusion in the White Australia Policy Era, 1901 - 1973

External activities

Memberships

Trustee, Landscape Research Group (2009-2023)

Councillor, Geographical Society of New South Wales (2016-2022)

CAUTHE Chapter Director (2016-2020)

Committee Member, Association of Critical Heritage Studies (2012-2014)

Member, HOME Commission (Scientific Commission of UISPP) (2016-2021)

Member, Landscape Research Group (2009-present)

Steering Committee Membership

Relics of Nature: An Archaeology of Natural Heritage in the High North (Norwegian Research Council, PI Þóra Pétursdóttir)

Reconfiguring Heritage: Present Engagements with Communities’ Pasts for Resilient Futures (UKRI Future Leaders Award, PI Sofya Shahab)

Fellowships

Honorary Professor, Aarhus University, 2024-2029

Adjunct Professor, Western Sydney University, 2022-2028

Elected Fellow, Geographical Society of New South Wales

Visiting Fellow, Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU), 2020

Visiting Fellow, York St John University, 2016-2018

Editorial duties

Consulting Editor, Landscape Research

Book Series Editor (with Professor Divya Tolia-Kelly), Critical Studies in Heritage, Emotion and Affect (Routledge)

Advisory Board, Oxford Intersections: Heritage, Culture and Knowledge

Editorial Board Member, International Journal of Heritage Studies 

Editorial Board Member, Journal of Heritage Tourism