Charlotte Andrews (University of Cambridge; cea34@cam.ac.uk), Jesse Ransley (University of Southampton; jesse@soton.ac.uk) and Eleni Stefanou (University of Southampton; stefanou@soton.ac.uk)

This session explores the ever-expanding intersection of uses of the sea and uses of the past. Maritime heritage is a distinctive area of heritage and museum studies, maritime history and archaeology, as indicated by the rapidly growing genres of maritime museums and maritime history. The diverse meanings and manifestations in this arena are not simply united by descriptive coincidence or reductive supraculturalism, but constitute a rising research agenda brimming with a comparative potential that preserves and renews case specificity. However, the idea of what constitutes maritime heritage as a realm of cultural production, remains remarkably narrow and conceptually immature. Given the fundamental relationship between identity and heritage, the processes of identity construction and negotiation within and across the spheres of maritimity and heritage require special attention.

The two-fold aim of this session is thus to expand conceptions of maritime heritage as an ethnographic object of study, while pushing forward a more clearly articulated framework for this area of heritage and museological analysis. We invite papers analysing constructions of maritime heritage and maritime ‘pasts’ by museums, nation-states, communities and individuals with notions of identity at their centre. Papers will be focused on meaning-making rather than methodologies, as well as the tensions and interactions of varied voices and experiences. In particular, we welcome papers that:

• cross-sect the boundaries between authorised, national, public and private, maritime heritage and the more personal and everyday discourses, interrogating the space between the more and less conscious uses;

• problematise representations and narratives of maritime identity in museums, and investigate museum interactions, connections or alienations with their local, source or core maritime communities and users;

• examine other uses of maritimity for identity construction, whether sites of memory-making and ‘maritime tradition’ or highly 'presentist', performative and physical experiences that push the boundaries of heritage as a relationship with the past;

• offer fresh conceptualisation of dominant, stereotypical maritime themes (i.e. boats, masculinity/gender, physicality, etc.) or introduce innovative conceptual idioms prevalent in maritime heritage that may supply anchors to secure the diverse case studies and wider heritage and museological theory.