Project description
Engaging cultural heritage for a greener tomorrow
Petrocultures refer to societies and cultures deeply intertwined with the extraction, production and consumption of fossil fuels, particularly petroleum. Understanding these petrocultures is crucial for engaging citizens and fostering environmentally transformative shifts in behaviours and perspectives. The EU-funded PITCH project illuminates how cultural heritage intersects with petrocultures and how the latter impact societies. Cultural heritage, whether in the form of objects, sites or landscapes, can be mobilised directly in imagining alternative sustainable futures. Through collaborative pilot interventions with cultural heritage institutions and a comprehensive toolkit, PITCH equips heritage practitioners and policymakers to navigate green transitions confidently, ensuring a lasting imprint on Europe’s diverse landscape.
Objective
Petroculture’s Intersections with The Cultural Heritage sector in the context of green transitions (PITCH) brings together academic and cultural sector organisation partners in six countries to spur on the processes by which humanities and arts scholarship and public interventions can strengthen citizen engagement with the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and its relationship to past and present petrocultures. Our innovative and significant multi-site pilot events will provide a model for employing cultural heritage to creatively engage citizens to spur on environmentally-transformative shifts in both individual and collective organisational/institutional behaviours. We will provide heritage practitioners and policymakers with the tools to repurpose existing and future forms of heritage to facilitate just green transitions.
PITCH will create a deeper understanding of petroculture’s intersections with heritage practices and how this reflects social, economic, and political changes over time through our historical and analytical work in archives and collections and map the secondary literature on the intersections between petrocultures and heritage cultures. We will conduct pilot interventions at three different types of sites (museums, industrial heritage sites, and heritage landscapes) with four cultural heritage partners to help citizens understand how petrocultures have affected their lives and be confident about how they might envision those lives otherwise. In order to ensure the long-lasting impact of the pilot interventions, we will collaborate with key international and European policy-making and practitioner organisations to help citizens face current and future societal transformations with greater confidence. We will develop policy briefings and digital toolkit to ensure the recommended methods are effective across the cultural, geographic, political and socio-economic diversity of Europe.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
4021 Stavanger
Norway