PHOENIX - Parallel Heritage of European Universities
Tasked with the curation of the knowledge of the past, its transmission in the present, and the invention of knowledge for the future, universities provide a unique platform upon which to debate and experiment with heritage. At the same time, they themselves constitute a heritage, manifested tangibly in collections of buildings and objects, and intangibly in practices and traditions.
This is a heritage we might associate with the medieval scriptorium, the Renaissance Kunstkammer, the enlightenment observatory, the modern(ist) laboratory, the German Lehrapparat, the contemporary digital network and the archives that supply them with raw data. Each has been, at some point in time, a factory for knowledge, and each of them has (or will) end up as its museum/mausoleum – an object of study in itself. How might this position as both subject and object of reflection enable universities to contribute to wider discussions about heritage across Europe? The target of the PHOENIX project is to focus on specific case studies involving external partners to our universities in order to investigate on how university heritage could be shared among wider, non-academic audiences. All eight members of the Una Europa consortium have been collaborating to this project during the academic year 2020/2021.
The aim of this workshop is twofold. First, we will gather the researchers and their partners to present the cases studies on which they have been working during the past months. Various experiences have been explored with a diversity of partners on how university heritage can be of interest for a larger community beyond academia. Second, we will take the opportunity of this first joint project on our universities cultural heritage to present an overview of the current situation of museums and collections in each of our institutions across Una Europa, with a particular view on how communication on university cultural heritage is developed locally and how it could lead to a common UNA Europa discourse on its shared cultural heritage.
The work accomplished up to now and the workshop will lead to the writing of a synthesis, which will offer ground for future work on the Una Europa cultural heritage.