This US-Spain IRES project will provide an early-career international research experience for fifteen undergraduate and graduate students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Five Colleges consortium. Participants will conduct systematic, comparative research around the theme of "Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)" in collaboration with the graduate Program in Cul-tural Management at the University of Barcelona in Spain. For each of the three years, research projects will be organized around a central research stream: 1) "Memory, monuments, and commemoration," 2) "Multicultural heritage in Europe" and 3) "Producing localities." By developing their projects in relation to a central set of research questions, students will contribute to three key areas of inquiry for global, comparative investigation of cultural heritage as a site of contestation, conflict, and cohesion. Anthropol-ogists have critically engaged the concepts of culture and heritage for decades, but the rise of the field of heritage management offers new opportunities for ethnographic investigation of how core disciplinary concepts are used by policymakers, citizens, and other social actors. The proposed program provides an integrative framework for an ethnographic field school that will draw the participation of students across the four subfields of anthropology and serve as a model for interdisciplinary teambuilding in applied heritage anthropology.
Government institutions face new demands to develop public programming that reflects our nation's diverse, multicultural heritage, and there is a growing need for social scientists trained in applied heritage anthropology and related fields. Broader impacts of this project include: 1) training a diverse group of US students for international, comparative anthropological research on cultural heritage policies in multicul-tural, democratic societies; 2) developing scientific networks between anthropologists in the US and Spain that will form the basis for further international sponsored research; and 3) collaborating with faculty and students from Spain to produce a body of systematic, comparative research publications available to the public through an online project hub. This project will build synergistic initiatives between European partner institutions and the UMass Department of Anthropology, the Heritage and Society Studies and European Studies certificate programs, and the Five Colleges consortium.
This US-Spain IRES project provided a semester-length international research experience for fifteen graduate students recruited from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Five Colleges consortium between 2010-2013. The co-PIs recruited three student cohorts to conduct systematic, comparative research on the theme of "Cultural Heritage in European Societies and Spaces (CHESS)" as part of a research project and training program in collaboration with the University of Barcelona in Spain. The CHESS project has three primary goals aimed at globalizing training in applied heritage anthropology: (1) to provide fifteen US undergraduate and early-career graduate students with the opportunity to conduct original ethnographic fieldwork and to develop their capacity for international research at an early stage in their anthropological training; (2)to produce new knowledge about issues of culture and heritage, through systematic, comparative field research in sites in Spain and Europe, and (3) to build strong, international, scientific networks among anthropology students and faculty at US, Spanish, and other European institutions through workshops, research partnerships, and collaborative conference panels and scholarly publications. The CHESS project accomplished the three primary goals of international training, building international scientific networks, and producing new knowledge about culture and heritage. Fifteen (15) U.S.-based students completed coursework and international field research under the auspices the CHESS program, conducting fieldwork in eleven different countries (Spain, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey). Each year of the training program, a faculty supervisor led a cohort of five students through the process of designing and conducting field research projects organized around a central research stream. The field supervisors guided students through a three-semester course series, including a fall-semester ethnographic research design and methods course, a spring-semester course requiring field research in Europe and participation in two workshops with University of Barcelona faculty and students, and a fall-semester capstone course on the management, analysis, presentation, and writing up of field research data. Following this international training and field research experience, participating CHESS students disseminated findings through organizing 3 conference panels, giving 49 conference and invited scholarly presentations, publishing 8 peer-reviewed journal articles to date. CHESS faculty disseminated findings in 33 conference and invited scholarly presentations, 9 peer-reviewed journal articles and 3 book manuscripts (one published, two under contract). We also maintain an online publications hub and working paper series in the University Library’s ScholarWorks Digital Repository (http://scholarworks.umass.edu/chess/), where publications have been downloaded at a rate of 360 times a month on average. Students come away with substantive research experiences and scholarly networking in a wide variety of countries, united under annual common research streams including: "Multicultural and Immigration", "Crisis and Cultural Heritage", "Sustainability", "Space, Placemaking and the Politics of the Local", "Memory, Monuments and Commemoration." We achieved our goal of building international scientific networks by organizing six (6) international workshops where CHESS students and faculty met with students and faculty from the University of Barcelona in Spain, as well as faculty members from Deusto University (Spain). We hosted our Spanish counterparts at UMass, where they gave presentations, seminars, and small-group research consultations with CHESS students. We also hosted Europeanist anthropologists from Portugal, Ireland, and Canada in the UMass Anthropology Department during the CHESS grant. We have now co-organized three conference panels with colleagues from University of Barcelona--one at the American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago and two at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) meetings in Paris and Tallinn. Through a design that allows students to be mentored in developing international networks and experiences early on in their careers, as well as the mentoring and encouragement students receive to present their results at international conferences, CHESS lays the groundwork for successful international collaborations in the future.
