Twenty two cultural heritage managers were able to explore the Greek island of Paros and dive deep into its communities during this years’ Engaging Communities in Cultural Heritage Summer Field School that ran from June 17 to June 30. Eleven of our trainees attended online and another eleven in person. 

“The Summer School was amazing, very intense, both in terms of our schedule but also in terms of the relationships that we were building and the activities we undertook outside the classroom, from participant observation to to a very casual outing or an invitation to a local event,” said Dr. Lena Stefanou. 

This summer’s trainees came from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America – Azerbaidjan, Bangladesh, France, Greece, Kenya, Lithuania, Malawi, Nigeria, Romania, South Africa, Sudan, Switzerland, Tanzania Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom, USA, and Zimbabwe. 

The training sessions as well as the final event, during which the participants presented their work to the wider community in Paros, all took place in the Dimitrakopoulos Building in the town of Paroikia that was generously made available by the Municipality of Paros. 

During this intensive 2-week field school, participants were introduced to the principles of community engagement and heritage values and presented with a dynamic mode of interdisciplinary research tailored to community needs. 

“Community engagement is often messy and unpredictable work. Participants in our Community Engagement Summer school gain the skills and techniques to conduct their own research, to plan effective community engagement projects that are tailor-made for the communities they are working with” said Dr. Aris Anagnostopoulos, HERITΛGE Community Engagement Manager. 

Trainees had the opportunity to do collaborative research and get involved in community engagement initiatives. They also received training in applied ethnography, conducted oral history interviews, learned to document personal narratives, and file and catalogue oral history archives. They also practiced curating multimedia content and creating narratives for online presentations and/or podcasts and explored the possibilities of cultural heritage becoming part of online repositories and temporary exhibitions.

Participants also attended lectures by invited speakers who specialize on diverse heritage fields and had the opportunity to hear from representatives of HERITΛGE partners Paros Festival and Ai Mnimai who presented real-life, local case studies on community engagement and cultural heritage. 

“I applied to this workshop to improve my fieldwork methodology, and I found it greatly helped me develop because I was able to learn about those details that we cannot learn without going into the field and starting to work. It has really helpful for me on how to conduct my research questions and how to engage with the people I am interviewing,” said Elif Aydin, a PhD Candidate at Istanbul Technical University. 

Summer school participants also had the opportunity to attend a presentation of SHIFT, a project funded by Horizon Europe to help make cultural heritage more accessible, inclusive and appealing using techological advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, haptics, and other sectors.