UU Heritage Lecture and Dr. Albert van der Zeijden Thesis Award Ceremony

We are excited to announce this year’s UU Heritage Lecture, followed by the Dr. Albert van der Zeijden Thesis Award ceremony to honour the best thesis on intangible heritage. The Lecture and ceremony will take place on April 11, 2025, 14.00-17.00 at Drift 25, Room 002, at Utrecht University.

UU Heritage Lecture: Selling the past to remember it: Tourism’s generative frictions of slavery and colonial heritage

Emmanuel Adu-Ampong

In this lecture, I offer an invitation and a provocation through this proposition: we need to sell the past in order to remember it.  A number of questions emerge from here not least that of which aspects of the past we need to sell, to whom, when, where and for how much.  To answer these questions, I explore the ways in which tourism provides an avenue that generates (non-) value for those aspects of the past (heritage) we might want to sell. In particular, I focus on the generative frictions of tourism in relation to the shared slavery and colonial heritage traces in the Ghana-Suriname-Netherlands triangle. I will elaborate on how tourism’s packaging and selling of this heritage is essential to the social production, consumption and consequent remembrance of this past. The more we sell the past, the more we are likely to remember it.

Emmanuel Adu-Ampong is Associate Professor in the Cultural Geography group at Wageningen University. As a post-disciplinary researcher, he has roots in sociology, social work, geography, development studies, international relations and, urban studies and planning. Adu-Ampong serves as a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the international Tourism Planning and Development journal and is also a Senior Research Associate at the School of Tourism and Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Adu-Ampong’s main research programme is centred on the tourism geographies of slavery and heritage in relation to the politics of cultural memory. The ambition of this research programme is to develop an interdisciplinary theory of cultural memories linked to slavery and colonial heritage tourism – i.e. to theorise the tourism-led activation of cultural memories of slavery and colonial heritage by showing how the elements and dimensions within slavery and colonial heritage tourism encounters intersect and scale up into (changing) societal narratives and the (re)activation of cultural memories. This research is currently funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant award for the project: ‘Frictions of Space: the generative tensions of slavery and colonial heritage tourism’(2025 – 2030). 

The keynote is followed by the Dr Albert van der Zeijden Thesis Prize ceremony for the best thesis on intangible heritage. The prize is posthumously named after Dr Albert van der Zeijden, a leading historian with a passion for intangible heritage. The winner will receive €1,000 and a unique trophy. Three theses have been nominated for the prize. You can read more about the nominees here (in Dutch).

The event is free. Please register via this form.

The lecture and award ceremony are co-organized by the UU Memory and Heritage Network and the Kenniscentrum Immaterieel Erfgoed Nederland (KIEN).