Dr Elizabeth Robson

Social values of National Trust for Scotland heritage places: towards an organisational approach

I am delighted to be working with colleagues at the University of Stirling and the National Trust for Scotland on a new project, titled ‘Social values of National Trust for Scotland heritage places: towards an organisational approach’. This three-year project (2023-2026) builds on from my doctoral research and will further develop our understanding of the role participatory methods play in assessing the social values of the historic environment. The collaborative research will involve several case studies of Trust properties, providing an opportunity to look at places associated with both natural and cultural heritage. In the wider institutional context, we will explore how knowledge of social values is generated and put to work within organisational policies and practices. The project is led by Prof. Siân Jones and myself, as Research Fellow, working closely with colleagues from the Trust.

Further details and updates about this project are available on the project website.

This research has been funded by the National Trust for Scotland and the project forms part of a wider partnership between the Trust and the University of Stirling.

Demonstrating the effectiveness of Arts and Humanities research for addressing the needs of different locales

From July 2022 to July 2023, I was part of a small team based at the University of Glasgow working on the Place-based Research Programme, which is examining the impact of arts and humanities research on place-based needs and priorities. The Programme is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and led by Prof. Rebecca Madgin, the AHRC’s Programme Director for Place.

In my role as Post-doctoral Research Associate, I took a lead in evidencing the breadth of place-based work funded by AHRC (analysing records from the UK Research and Innovation Gateway to Research and Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 and 2021 databases) and developing an open call for evidence to address emerging questions and gaps.

I co-authored the Phase One Programme Report, Developing a People-Centred, Place-Led Approach: The Value of the Arts and Humanities, which was launched in June 2023.

For more on the Programme, please see https://gla.ac.uk/place.

CURBATHERI – Curating Sustainable URBAn Transformations through HERItage 

The ‘Deep Cities’ project is an international collaboration exploring how historic transformation impacts on values related to the urban built environment. I was a Research Assistant on the project (June – October 2021) with the University of Stirling team, which was led by Dr Chiara Bonacchi (PI) and Prof Siân Jones (Co-I).

I used qualitative, participatory research methods to explore the values associated with two sites, one in the Canongate area of Edinburgh and one in Woolwich, London. I also contributed to overall project activities, including co-ordination meetings (partners in four countries), knowledge exchanges, presentations, reports and other outputs, such as joint publications and conference papers.

The following co-authored paper was been prepared based on this research:

Chiara Bonacchi, Siân Jones, Elisa Broccoli, Alex Hiscock & Elizabeth Robson (2023) Researching heritage values in social media environments: understanding variabilities and (in)visibilities, International Journal of Heritage Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2023.2231919

Deep Cities was funded by the Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage. For more on the project, please see: https://curbatheri.niku.no/

Wrestling with Social Value: An Examination of Methods and Approaches for Assessing Social Value in Heritage Management and Conservation

My collaborative doctoral project (2018 – 2021) focused on the challenges and opportunities surrounding the assessment of social values in heritage management and conservation. The aim was to develop and trial a suite of qualitative methods for examining social values in a variety of ‘real-world’ heritage contexts. The resulting evidence-base was used to identify a methodological toolkit to help meet the needs of the heritage conservation profession and to deepen our understanding of the social value of the historic environment.

In this project, ‘social value’ refers to the significance of the historic environment to contemporary communities, including people’s sense of identity, belonging, attachment and place.

For more on this project, please see the items under ‘PhD Research’ on the main menu and the section on Writing.