Guilherme Pozzer is a historian and heritage studies scholar specialising in industrial heritage and the memory of deindustrialisation. He is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, where he leads the project Memories and Well-being in Post-Industrial Communities (MemoWb), a comparative study of community engagement with industrial heritage and well-being across European contexts. He holds a PhD in History (specialisation in Heritage, European Doctorate Label) from the University of Minho in collaboration with the University of Seville. His research combines historical method with digital, spatial, and community-based approaches, addressing memory politics, active forgetting, and the affective and creative dimensions of post-industrial heritage. Within DePOT he is an Affiliated Researcher and a member of the Curatorial Committee for Histories of Deindustrialisation Through Objects. He is also Board Member and Projects Coordinator of TICCIH (The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage) and leads the TICCIH MapaPI collaborative mapping initiative documenting industrial heritage across Latin America and the Caribbean, and serves as curatorial and museological consultant (pro bono) to the River Ave Valley Textile Industry Museum (MITBA) in Portugal. His work spans Portugal, Brazil, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Project statement
Memories, identities, and wellbeing in post-industrial communities
Particularly in post-industrial contexts, communities are frequently put aside in decision making processes concerning their own heritage and are excluded as active social subjects in processes of heritage making that should compose its own identity and to which their memories are connected. In this regard, there is also a gap in Industrial Heritage studies regarding the impacts of these processes on community wellbeing. Thus, my research addresses how current uses and different levels of community engagement with industrial heritage contributes to build practices of memory making and identity making and their impacts on communities’ wellbeing in contexts of deindustrialization through case studies in Europe. This will provide the proper European context on the relationship between communities and heritage institutions of reference by asking how deindustrialized heritage sites have been used, managed, and preserved while simultaneously considering the perspective of post-industrial communities’ inclusion in the process of heritage making and conservation.
You can find them in:
- De-Industrial Heritage “Crafting the Past: Empowering Communities through Creative Writing, Visual Narratives, Memory, and Place-Making” 49:21-58:30
