Shifting boundaries, ambivalent stakes: towards a critical research agenda on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Justice

As an introduction to the Special Issue on Frontiers and Boundaries of Intangible Cultural Heritage and Justice, this article explores the ambiguities of mobilising intangible cultural heritage (ICH) for social, environmental, and more-than-human justice. The Special Issue emerges from an observation that, increasingly, ICH is deployed as part of a broader repertoire of resistance, refusal, adaptation, and resurgence in struggles against various forms of violence, dispossession, erasure, top-down development, or environmental harm. The contributions in this collection explore international case studies to reveal the shifting boundaries of ICH and justice and their emergent ambivalent stakes. Together, they show how these justice-seeking practices often operate ambiguously within the very frameworks and structures of recognition and redress they seek to contest, navigating the tensions between representation and refusal, or resistance and co-optation. Rather than attempting to resolve these tensions, we suggest that critical heritage research should acknowledge ICH’s capacity to nurture collective imagination and alternative political futures while remaining attentive to the conditions that limit, derail, or neutralise its very transformative potential, and to scholars’ own implicated position within it.