15.01.2021

Taking into account global developments and shifts, the protection and preservation of Europe’s cultural heritage are of great importance. This requires research across national borders. The European Joint Programming Initiative Cultural Heritage (JPICH) organizes a series of joint transnational calls for proposals in the field of cultural heritage. These calls aim to support research into strategies, methodologies and tools to safeguard and use the physical components of cultural heritage.

The call Cultural Heritage, Identities & Perspectives: Responding to Changing Societies (CHIP) invited scholars to submit research proposals on the role of heritage in society from different (inter)national perspectives and value systems. This included questions such as what role heritage plays in the formation of identities, how institutions can manage heritage in an inclusive manner, and to what extent digitization contributes to meaningful access to heritage.

Applicants were encouraged to collaborate in a cross-disciplinary manner in order to combine knowledge and expertise from the humanities and social sciences, arts, and the technical and/or physical sciences. Interdisciplinary exchange is necessary to develop innovative research into cultural heritage. Five topics have therefore been selected in the call. Applicants were expressly invited to combine questions from/perspectives on several topics.

In the JPICH CHIP Call for Proposals, 90 interdisciplinary research proposals were submitted by transnational consortia within the context of a single project. Six projects are elected for funding. The funded research projects range in subject matter from Olive Heritage to South-East Asian Sound Archives. These research projects are:

  • CULTIVATE – Co-creating cultural narratives for sustainable rural development
  • DeCoSEAS – Decolonizing South-East Asian Sound Archives
  • NuSPACES – Nuclear spaces: Communities, Materialities and Locations of Nuclear Cultural Heritage
  • OLIVE4ALL – Olive Heritage for Sustainable Development: Raising Community Awareness of Living Heritage
  • PICCH – Polyvocal Interpretation of Contested Colonial Heritage
  • RCL: ICH –Re-voicing cultural landscapes: narratives, perspectives and performances of marginalised intangible cultural heritage

The six transnational consortia that implement the projects are funded by science funders from the countries involved in the JPI Cultural Heritage. The countries participating in this call are Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The research projects collectively receive approximately € 3,9 million.

Illustration – Banner: Freshly harvested olives, Crete, Greece © Georgios Tchislis