Here and Now at Historic Sites: Pupils and Guides Experiencing Heritage with Prof. Cecilia Trenter, Malmö University

The paper explores the meaning-making of cultural heritage in school field trips to sites in the region Östergötland in Sweden. It treats the materiality of the place and experiences of the guides and the pupils, as meaning-making resources during the site visits. It emphasises that experience and materiality are crucial for creating a multitemporal ‘here and now’. Users of the historic site, both visiting pupils and guides, bring their experiences as resources in the negotiations. This meaning-making experience functions as collective unification during the tour and in the interviews. The stock of knowledge comes in the form of acquaintances, such as with history learned in school or with parts of the historical canon concerning, for example, local figures or national history; and with the historic site as cultural heritage that is part of the traditional county itinerary. The pupils’ and guides’ stock of knowledge is mobilised during the visit by means of the tour and the visitors’ actions, physically, emotionally and verbally. Finally, the paper underlines that haptic, visual and emotional interaction with the materiality of the historic site have a decisive impact on how the mobilisation of the stock of knowledge takes place and multitemporalities arise.

Cecilia Trenter is Professor of History and History Education at Malmö University, Sweden. She works within the research field of memory studies and public history, including heritage adaptions and remediation in fiction, i.e. epic films (Zack Snyder’s 300) and computer games (BioWare’s Dragon Ages series). In addition, she is studying heritage sites with educational approaches, for instance, in the monograph Here and Now at Historic Sites: Pupils and Guides Experiencing Heritage (Ludvigsson, Stolare & Trenter, Cambridge University Press2024). Trenter is co-editor, with Anna Höglund, of The Enduring Fantastic: Essays on Imagination and Western Culture (McFarland, 2021) and, with Cecilia Axelsson Yngveus and Malin Thor Tureby, of (UN)CONTESTED HERITAGE. ARCHIVES, MUSEUMS AND PUBLIC SPACES (Malmö University 2023).

Trenter is a co-creator of the Nordic network The Fantastic in Cultural History and is a member of the editorial board of the series Global Historical Fictions (Brills).

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