“Heritage” is made up of attributions in the interactions between significant and often unequal players in a given historical setting that allows the labeling of “cultural” or “natural heritage” to be successful. “Heritage”, then, can reconfigure power relations, can create and deny access, or legitimize inclusion or exclusion. “Heritage” is thus bound to research debates on the capitalist valorization of nature and culture; on institutions involved in that process (e.g. patents, labeling processes); on different forms of knowledge which perceive, evaluate, use, and claim ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, or natural resources and cultural goods, in sometimes very diverging and conflicting ways; on global history, colonialism, and the importance of the appropriation of natural and cultural spaces for capitalism and western modernity; on hybridity, linguistic/discoursive attribution, and cultural codes used in the past and in the present.

Bearing in mind the significance and relevance of the concept, this Winter School looks at ways to approach the complex field of tension between claims and counterclaims over natural and cultural heritage. What designs and techniques are appropiate for understanding the labeling process of “cultural/natural heritage” and what roles are played by private and public actors? What possible methods are there to evaluate the way in which actors on different spatial and temporal scales refer to, make sense of, and use cultural and natural heritage, and what forms of narratives about it do they employ? What are the research perspectives on power relations and reconfigurations of access related to space, nature, and culture? These are some of the questions CLAIMS_2023 aims to answer.