How healthy is the historic preservation field today, in 2023? Is historic preservation relevant to the public and to experts, including scholars? Ever since I entered the field in 1998, my anecdotal experience has been that general interest in the field has been been on the decline, while, at the same time, people who are working in an area directly related to preservation policy (i.e., government laws, regulations, guidelines) or historic preservation advocacy have increased their efforts. I’ve also observed related fields, such as urban and town planning, increasingly embrace what its prac ..read more

Earlier this year, as part of Lived Heritage Studies LLC, I successfully completed a project for the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Vermont (UVM) to help them create a “curricular vision” for their program. This project was catalyzed by UVM’s proposal, in 2020, to terminate many low-enrollment graduate programs, including the Historic Preservation Program, which is one of the oldest in the country. The call for consulting services asked for the development of a curricular vision with a focus on a limited residency format “in ways that maximize the strengths offered by the ..read more

Before I left my position as an associate professor at the University of Maryland in May 2022, I created a curated list of YouTube conference presentations since 2020 that address diversity, inclusion, equity, justice, and relevancy in historic preservation practice in relation to federal, state, and local government policy. I originally intended these curated presentations to be of benefit for the faculty in my historic preservation program, but realized that they have much broader value outside of this context. Note that, with a few exceptions, these are people with minoritized identities w ..read more

Are you a researcher, or practitioner who uses applied research, who wants to conduct work related to people-centered historic preservation? Have you tried to find funding to support your research? More than likely, you’ve quickly found that historic preservation funders will only support FHBM research: This is research based on the interpretation of factual histories (e.g., local history research) or bricks and mortar work. Need funding to research contemporary people and their relationship to old or heritage places? Do you have a need to research issues around social justice, inclusion, and ..read more

As I was listening to the session on “A New Framework for Blended Conservation of the Built and Natural Environment” from PastForward 2020 (the US National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference), I was inspired to write this post. While the aim of the session was admirable, what I saw were people innately motivated to work in wild and natural areas dabbling in preservation and people innately inspired by cultural landscapes dabbling in natural resource conservation. Neither seemed particularly interested in each other’s perspectives beyond superficial understandings. There was l ..read more

What artificial intelligence (AI) thinks of historic preservation Unless you’ve been sequestered over the past year, you’ve probably heard about the growing controversy on artificial intelligence (AI). A recent example is ChatGPT, a “chatbot” created by OpenAI. To use ChatGPT, you create an account and, through a web based “chat” interface, you ask ChatGPT questions using your natural language. You can, for instance, ask ChatGPT to “Summarize everything about the Apollo space program in 500 words,” and it will do this task for you, and reasonable accurately. More controversially, students can ..read more

A Reparative Call to Change the Administrative Procedure Act Historic preservation is fundamentally a policy-based endeavor, driven by governmental laws, regulations, and guidelines. And because of this basis, it’s also incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to make it more people-centered without some changes to state and federal administrative procedure acts. The fact is that nearly three-quarters of all paid, professional work in historic preservation, in the US, exists because of local, state, and federal preservation policy (Wells 2018). Realistically, there is no unique local or state ..read more

My Story and Why I Started Lived Heritage Studies It’s really not that fun being an iconoclast, but we need more people willing to challenge the status quo. When I used to teach and advise in a graduate historic preservation program, I would ask my students why they got interested in the field to help guide their career paths. Unfortunately, it’s not a question that gets asked often enough with professionals or academics in the field, because in its absence, we rely on many assumptions, true or not. In my particular experience, because I often talk and write about people and place, rather than ..read more

Two weeks ago, I quit my tenured position as an associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park to explore consulting opportunities in private practice. I am, in effect, retiring from higher education. As a staunch proponent of people-centered and human-centered historic preservation, I have learned in a particularly painful way that higher education is more interested in supporting the status quo and upholding a check-the-box mentality that values process more than social justice outcomes. In these characteristics, higher education mirrors preservation orthodoxy, which has do ..read more

Nearly two decades ago, I became deeply interested in how historic preservation doctrine, represented through orthodox preservation theory and expressed in international and national charters and rules, regulations, and guidelines, manifested as a social justice problem. The core issue is how this orthodox doctrine serves as a means to empower conventionally trained experts (e.g., architectural historians, archaeologists) with the control of someone else’s heritage while simultaneously disempowering the laypeople to whom this heritage actually belongs. Early in my journey, I discovered Lauraj ..read more