CHAMP ( Collaborative for Cultural Heritage and Museum Practices )

Contact details

D. Fairchild Ruggles

Co-Director

Dept. of Landscape Architecture

101 Temple Hoyne Buell Hall, MC-620
Champaign, IL 61820

Phone: (217) 333-0176

Fax: (217) 333-0176

Email: dfr1@illinois.edu

Helaine Silverman

Co-Director

Dept. of Anthropology

109 Davenport Hall, MC-148
Urbana, IL 61801

Phone: (217) 333-3616

Fax: (217) 244-3490

Email: helaine@illinois.edu

© 2003 The Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois

The Significance of CHAMP in the Contemporary Globalizing World

CHAMP is promoting critical approaches to the integrated study, display, and interpretation of cultural heritage and museums in the globalizing world. It innovatively combines intellectual analysis with practicum. These perspectives are unique in their fields and exceptionally timely under current conditions of globalization across the world.

As countries develop and as tourists travel, cultural heritage sites that were preserved by virtue of their isolation are now being severely damaged and even destroyed. At the same time, there is growing awareness that while heritage is necessary for the articulation of identity among resident peoples, unfortunately it also is a basis for inter-ethnic conflict. Out of this complicated situation arises an important opportunity for study, mediation, and mitigation that is being addressed by CHAMP.

Like the buildings and landscapes of cultural heritage sites, museums also have become major tourist destinations serving as dynamic engines for economic development in their regions (e.g., Getty Museum in Bilbao, Spain). Museums take many forms: object collections contained within a building, open-air historic sites, and even UNESCO's new category of "intangible heritage" or performance sites. All of these kinds of museums are venues for the articulation of cultural identity. Therefore, instead of treating museums as warehouses for precious objects that reflect culture "as they are commonly perceived", CHAMP treats them as sites for cultural production and the formation of social consciousness and identity. CHAMP addresses the politically, socially, economically and culturally sensitive world of museum work today.

CHAMP problematizes cultural heritage and museums from this politically extensive and historically deep perspective.

CHAMP promotes investigation of the ways that currents of globalization are complicated by regional economies and examination of the problematic intersection of the local and global in the construction, preservation and display practices of gendered, racial, cultural, and historic identities. We argue for an agenda of cultural heritage research and museum research that is pro-active in questioning the world and that assesses and addresses cultural production and its management as played out at sites and museums of all kinds.