Join us for our third seminar in the HGC Seminar Series on 6th October 2023 at 1 pm in K/159 in the Kings Manor:
“Time, Heritage, Assemblage Theory”
Professor Jason Dittmer, UCL
This workshop begins with the basics of assemblage theory, for those who have perhaps struggled with the primary texts of the field. Then, the workshop expands by relating assemblage theory to heritage, indicating the ways in which assemblage allows us to link together past, present, and future, as well as scales from the embodied to the global. This points to the power of assemblage thinking to position heritage studies at the centre of multiple contemporary debates.
Author Biography
Jason Dittmer is a Professor of Political Geography at University College London. His current research can be understood as an attempt to weave together geopolitics and assemblage theory. Informed by Deleuzean notions of time, his primary research now is an examination of British colonial heritage as it evolves into new forms and produces new futures. He is doing this through an in-depth examination of Gibraltar and the way its material heritage is upcycled to produce a new, non-colonial polity, and through a wider survey (with Prof. Emma Waterton) of British colonial heritage that has been curated as UNESCO world heritage sites. He is the author or co-author of Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity, 2nd edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), Diplomatic Material: Assemblage, Affect, and Foreign Policy (2017, Duke University Press), and Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero (Temple, 2013). He is also the editor of (co-editor) of Geopolitics: An Introductory Reader (Routledge, 2014), the Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography (Ashgate, 2014), Comic Book Geographies (Franz Steiner, 2014), and Mapping the End Times: American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions (Ashgate, 2010).