VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

This paper employs assemblage theory to trace the contours and the outreach of the culture and heritage ecosystem in a British multicultural city and how it affords (or denies) cultural engagement opportunities for young people. As developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988), and most recently by Manuel DeLanda (2006, 2016) assemblage theory aligns to principles of ecological and systems thinking, privileging an investigation approach that accounts for holism, interrelatedness, process and constant change. This perspective has been adopted in critical heritage studies to theorise heritage as entanglements of material, biological and socio-technical components and thus examine hegemonic systems of heritage interpretation, management and governance (e.g., Harrison 2021, 2013; Bennett et al 2017). The paper draws on an ethnographic study conducted in the multicultural city of Coventry (UK) to explore the role of cultural engagements in informing young people’s aspirations. The data corpus captures the views of official heritage institutions, as well as those of young people and community organisations, particularly from the Roma migrant community, gathered through semi-structured interviews and creative research workshops via participatory photography and communicative ecologies mapping. By applying assemblage theory on this rich data corpus, the paper offers a deep, nuanced analysis of the constitution of volatile cultural engagement spaces and the strategies used to reach out to the diverse youth population of the city. Theoretically, the paper extends previous scholarship on heritage assemblages by tracing the role of official and grassroots culture and heritage organisations in the constitution of youth engagement spaces, interpreted through a dual lens, coming from organisations and young people themselves.