Communicating Working Class Heritage in the 21st Century: Values, Lessons, Methods, and Meanings

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Communicating Working Class Heritage in the 21st Century: Values, Lessons, Methods, and Meanings," at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Heritage is increasingly expanding beyond traditional value systems to encompass new stakeholder groups as well as forgotten or ignored historical legacies. In this session, we discuss approaches archaeologists are using in the growing field of working class heritage, including the aspects of the field that make it unique amongst heritage- and/or community-based projects. Utilizing an archaeological perspective when presenting working class heritage to a non-specialist audience offers new opportunities for discussing these legacies and ensuring that these histories are not lost. Bringing together public and community archaeology projects and the ways working class heritage is communicated to various stakeholder groups allows for a synthesis of ideas and insights that will serve to strengthen our methods and guide this type of heritage interpretation into the future. Heritage is about people: the papers in this session will help develop best practices for making working class heritage relevant and useful to people today.