We are thrilled to announce that the Swiss Research Council will be supporting our new four-year research initiative, Critical Conservation.
Critical Conservation redefines conservation as a critical practice, theorizing it as a discursive, pluricultural, decolonial and epistemic activity shaped by politics, conventions, education, the economy and institutions. Emerging from the critical-reflective developments of recent decades, Critical Conservation seeks to engage with and learn from present-day communities of practice, including traditional knowledge holders, makers, artisans and craftsmen, broadly defined, who have historically been positioned outside the expert domain of professional and scholarly conservation in the West. Through transversal conservation, the project fosters transtemporal dialogue, bringing together separate fields of practice that often operate in the silos of their specialisms. Finally, it explores experimental conservation as a means to envision our discipline’s possible futures.
The idea for this project derived in part from the essay “The Technique of Conservation: On Realms of Theory and Cultures of Practice” (2017) and in part from research and writing on the fringes of current initiatives. I am excited to deepen our expertise and engagement with critical, contemporary approaches to the field, working alongside a dedicated team. The projected start of the initiative is the beginning of 2026.