Context
Critical heritage practices expand the field of remembrance beyond monuments and historical sites. They also include museums, academic collections, exhibitions, public discussions, and critical tours that question how heritage is collected, displayed, interpreted, and inherited.
This approach is especially relevant when working with sensitive legacies: colonial-era collections, human remains, looted or displaced objects, erased Jewish and other minorities histories, neglected cemeteries, and material traces of violence that remain embedded in contemporary institutions and urban landscapes.
Rather than treating museums and collections as neutral repositories of the past, critical heritage work asks how institutions are implicated in histories of exclusion, colonialism, nationalism, antisemitism, racism, scientific violence, and post-war erasure. It also creates space for new forms of responsibility, including ethics of care, repatriation, decolonial interpretation, public dialogue, and collaboration between NGOs, universities, museums, researchers, and affected communities.
Case Study 17: Jewish Architects of Breslau/Wrocław – Exhibitions, City Walks and Public Programs, Wrocław (Poland)
Highlights
- Connecting architectural history with Jewish heritage, urban development, and minority histories
- Combining exhibition interpretation, public lectures, academic seminars, and city walks
- Showing how Jewish architects shaped modern Breslau/Wrocław and East Central European metropolises
- Linking architecture with medicine, commerce, modernism, and changing urban identities
Description
In May and June 2026, the Urban Memory Foundation, together with the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Wrocław and the Bente Kahan Foundation, developed a public programme around the exhibition “Jewish Architects of Wrocław”.
The exhibition, curated by Dr. Eng. Arch., D.Sc. (habil.) Agnieszka Tomaszewicz and PhD, Architect Engineer Joanna Majczyk, was presented at the Jewish Studies Department of the University of Wrocław in Polish and English. The programme expanded the exhibition through curatorial tours, panel discussions, academic presentations, and thematic city walks.
The series explored the contribution of Jewish architects to the development of pre-war Breslau/Wrocław and East Central Europe. It addressed large-scale architectural projects, modernist transformations, department stores, synagogues, medical architecture, and the role of Jewish professionals in shaping modern urban life.
The programme included events such as:
- “Jewish Architects in Breslau: Large Projects of the 19th and 20th Century. From the New Synagogue to Department Stores”
- “Towards Modernism – Jewish Architects and New Metropolises”
- “Blueprints of Belonging: Jewish Architects in Interwar East Central Europe”, an international academic seminar with keynote speaker Martin Kohlrausch from KU Leuven
The accompanying walks introduced participants to selected architectural sites, including the old medical campus, the area of the former Jewish Hospital, and buildings connected with the Ehrlich family and other Jewish architects. These routes allowed participants to understand architecture not only as material heritage, but also as evidence of social mobility, professional collaboration, minority participation, and erased urban memory.
Challenges
- HOW to make the contribution of Jewish architects visible in a city where Jewish history was largely erased?
- HOW to connect architectural history with broader questions of belonging, exclusion, and urban modernity?
- HOW to move beyond expert knowledge and create public engagement with overlooked minority histories?
Solutions
- Combining exhibition-based learning with public discussions and urban walks.
- Presenting architecture as both material heritage and social history.
- Linking Jewish architectural heritage with medicine, commerce, modernism, and civic life.
- Creating bilingual and interdisciplinary formats accessible to academic and non-academic audiences.
Case Study 18: Sensitive Legacy in University Collections – Publications and Research Collaboration, Tasmania & Wrocław, (Australia / Poland)
Highlights
- Connecting NGO practice, academic research, museums, and international repatriation expertise
- Addressing sensitive academic and museum collections through ethics of care
- Producing open-access scholarly outputs on difficult heritage, decolonization, and repatriation
Description
The publication of the special issue “Sensitive Legacy in University Collections” in Prace Kulturoznawcze marked an important outcome of collaboration between the Urban Memory Foundation, universities, academic museums, and researchers working on difficult heritage, repatriation, and ethics of care.
The issue emerged from the conference “Sensitive Legacy in University Collections: Between Adaptation and Restitution”, co-organized by the Urban Memory Foundation as part of the EU-funded MultiMemo project. It focuses on sensitive heritage in academic and museum collections, especially the material and intellectual legacies of colonial-era science.
The articles address institutional responsibility, ethics of care, decolonization, human remains, repatriation, and new methods for working with difficult heritage. The issue includes the article by Agata Strządała and Agnieszka Jabłońska, “Rethinking heritage through an ethics of care: Insights into NGO–university collaboration from the ‘Sensitive Legacy’ conference”: https://czasopisma.uwr.edu.pl/pkult/issue/view/1405
This article shows how cooperation between an NGO, museums, and universities can become a space for developing new practices of responsibility, dialogue, and care towards heritage requiring particular sensitivity.
The publication reflects broader cooperation between the Urban Memory Foundation, Wrocław Medical University, cultural studies scholars at the University of Wrocław, the Jagiellonian University Museum Collegium Maius, the University of Wrocław Museum, and researchers and institutions from Australia, including the University of Tasmania and the International Centre for Repatriation Training, Practice and Research at the Australian National University.
Within this case, publication was not the only form of knowledge production. The public panel “Wrocław Nieoczywisty”, held on 18 September 2025 at the University of Wrocław, was another important element of the process. Taking the exhibition “Uwikłane” as its starting point, the panel opened a broader discussion on Wrocław’s complex and often uncomfortable heritage. It connected questions of sensitive collections, internal decolonisation, erased cemeteries, academic museums, and civic memory work. The event was organised by the Urban Memory Foundation and the University of Wrocław Museum, bringing together researchers, museum professionals, activists, and public audiences around the question of how inherited collections and urban memory can be critically reinterpreted today.
Another example connected to critical heritage studies is the forthcoming publication Difficult Heritage in an Age of Crises: A Guide to New Approaches for Sustainability, Community, and Engagement, currently being prepared within the framework of Thinking Through the Museum, an international research network, and to be published in the Exhibiting Theory series by Jagiellonian University Press. Combining academic and theoretical perspectives with reflections by artist-practitioners and elements of autoethnography, the publication will present a broad range of methodologies and practices that can be applied to critical, community-oriented, and socially engaged approaches to heritage and memory work.
Challenges
- HOW to transform academic and museum collections into spaces of ethical responsibility?
- HOW to work with human remains and colonial-era scientific legacies?
- HOW to build meaningful cooperation between NGOs, universities, museums, and international researchers?
Solutions
- Producing open-access research outputs that connect theory and practice.
- Framing sensitive collections through ethics of care, not only ownership or display.
- Building international collaboration around repatriation, decolonization, and institutional responsibility.
- Treating conferences, public panel discussion and publications as part of long-term heritage transformation, not only academic dissemination.
See also Case Studies: 5, 6, 13