Multivocality in World Heritage: Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, Norway

This book examines multivocality in 21st-century World Heritage management through an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of the complexity and plurality of voices on the ground at a specific World Heritage site, offering new perspectives and insights into the established inherent tension between change and heritage conservation.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the book presents a rich variety of cases grounded in a single World Heritage site, to provide new insights and perspectives on World Heritage as complex local phenomena entangled in global processes. Multivocality and constant change are fundamental to all societies, and must therefore be emphasised and also applied to World Heritage sites, including the UNESCO site under scrutiny in this volume: The Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Southern Norway. If World Heritage is to promote shared commitments to both conservation and principles of sustainability, the concept of conservation must acknowledge and accommodate change. Bringing together academic approaches from different disciplines, this edited volume addresses this pressing issue by paying serious attention to local complexities and multiple perspectives on the ground. The cases presented demonstrate the relevance of applying a broader sense of multivocality to improve practices in World Heritage management, policymaking, planning and governance. Multivocality emerges as a perspective attentive to diversity and complexity, questioning reductionism, and challenging monocultural thinking in global World Heritage management, while supporting a more democratic multitude of voices in World Heritage sites, both human and more-than-human.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the multidisciplinary field of heritage, heritage policymakers and bureaucrats, international advisory bodies to UNESCO, as well as managers at different levels in the World Heritage arena.

Inger Birkeland is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN), where she teaches nature-society relations, people-place relations, and education for sustainable development at the BA and MA levels in teacher education and culture studies. She supervises master students and doctoral candidates in teacher education and culture studies, has led the research group: Heritage in Use, and served on the board of USN’s doctoral program in Culture Studies. Her research interests since 2005 have been related to strengthening the cultural sustainability of the post-industrial communities of Rjukan and Notodden.

Steffen Fagernes Johannessen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Culture, Religion and Social Studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). He obtained his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, supported by a grant from the Max Planck Institute. Johannessen has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Indian Ocean, the UK, and around the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage site in Norway. His research focuses on socio-political memory and identity in relation to heritagisation processes, forced mobility, and performance. Currently, Johannessen leads the Heritage in Use Research Group and serves as USN’s observer on the World Heritage Board for the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage.

Guro Nordby is employed as a researcher at the Norwegian Industrial Workers Museum. She holds a Magister Artium in Ethnology from the University of Oslo and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). Her doctoral thesis focused on the Rjukan Railway, a museum railway of great importance to the industrial development in the region. Nordby has also authored and co-authored several non-fiction books on urban and rural history.

Benjamin Richards holds a Ph.D. in Culture Studies from the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). He works at Hardanger and Voss Museum and is a member of the Heritage in Use research group. Richards’ thesis explores themes of heritage, sustainability and becoming through research within the Rjukan-Notodden World Heritage Site. He has a background in filmmaking, heritage studies, ecological economics and border studies, with special interest in visual, sensory and phenomenological research methods.