Engaging the everyday: the concept and practice of ‘everyday heritage’

In this paper, we explore what it means to link heritage to the everyday, how this has been framed in the field of heritage studies to date and how engagement with the everyday might generate future opportunities for heritage practice. We highlight distinctive aspects of everyday heritage, including its post-representative nature, the importance of urban activism, digital and historical forms of cultural participation, as well as its aesthetic re-framing of the ordinary. We conclude that while the term is often used to describe a non-hegemonic, unofficial form of heritage, everyday heritage tends to merge the authorised and the unauthorised. We finish by distilling our findings into a working manifesto for everyday heritage as a provocation for future discussion and debate on this topic.