This study takes as its starting point 12-year-old pupils’ imagination when they take a tour and learn about past events at Löfstad Palace, a historic house museum in Sweden. The guide stimulates affections and haptics -- sensory dimensions such as hearing, seeing, and smelling (Ludvigsson et al 2021: 1) by telling ghost stories when mediating the past to the pupils. Most research about dark tourism and ghost tourism starts with analyzing the special guided tours in which paranormal elements characterize the event. This essay examines the use of paranormal features on a regular tour at Löfstad Palace to learn more about the past. The premise of this essay is that authenticity is not created solely by historical facts or by material traces of the past but rather by people's ability to collectively imagine (Trenter et al. 2021). Imagination is fundamental in the assumption that ghost experiences create authenticity. The essay proceeds in the following way: after presenting paranormal tourism’s relation to heritage and the past, I will briefly introduce affective and haptic aspects in history learning followed by how this pedagogical research can be connected to critical heritage studies’ focus on how visitors collectively encounter the past. Thereafter, these perspectives are combined with how the paranormal contributes to the affective and haptic dimensions. The paranormal element as a means of communicating cultural heritage is here understood in terms of how emotions and bodily senses, such as sight and hearing, as well as materiality, affect visitors’ experience of the past. The theoretical standpoints are accompanied by a presentation of the design of the project and method. Finally, tourist guides’ use of paranormal stories during a guided tour and the pupils’ subsequent reactions is explored. 

The study explores the meaning-making of cultural heritage in school field trips to five sites in the region Östergötland in Sweden. It treats the materiality of the place and experiences of the guides and the pupils, obtained in school as well as in other contexts, as meaning-making resources during the site visits. It emphasises that sites should be seen as processes, open to interpretations and reinterpretations. The visitor is steered by expectations and common values as well as by the ways in which the heritage site is displayed and presented. In the present study, both adults (guides) and children (pupils) are defined as visitors. The authors draw on theories from history education research and from heritage studies when interpreting how pupils encounter heritage sites, they underline the centrality of 'the flesh and embodied agency' in the experience of sites. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce cultural heritage through the lens of game design. The game industry should be studied within cultural heritagestudies on similar terms that museums, archives and other cultural heritage actors are studied, namely as creators and mediators of cultural heritage.

This chapter explores the use of heritage and history in the popular romance series The Legend of the Ice People (1982–1989) by Norwegian-Swedish author Margit Sandemo. The epos is the 47-volume multigenerational saga of a family. The series is here defined as a story world in which Sandemo is the creator, but fans are actively involved in collective negotiations. The use of the past within the series offers interpretations to readers, who are putting the old-fashion modes into up-to-date, concurrent, and contemporary understandings of morality by emerging from the historical past within the series. 

This anthology is the result of an international workshop with the aim to initiate new discussions and new research on cultural heritage – contested as well as uncontested. The workshop was held at the Department of Society, Culture and Identity at Malmö University, in October 2022. Contested heritage, sometimes also referred to as “dissonant heritage” or “difficult heritage” has been discussed, explored and studied by cultural heritage scholars from various disciplines over the last two decades. However, there is still limited knowledge about what contested or dissonant heritage is. How, when and by whom heritage can be contested and how it is related to or understood in relation to uncontested heritage are also unresolved questions. The contribution of this anthology thus falls at an intersection between the process-perspectives of critical heritage studies of cultural heritage, the empirical-historical studies of power and agency in social and cultural history (after the archival turn), and the conceptual fields that examine the use of history and history mediation. It rests firmly on the collective expertise drawn from historians and other scholars, at different stages of their careers, from researchers with theoretical proficiency as well as practical experience from cultural heritage work, both within and outside of traditional cultural heritage institutions. The result, if not a comprehensive rendering, is a range of multifaceted insights into research on why and how cultural heritage can be both contested and (un)contested.

Haptics in the sense of active touch, as well as internally felt bodily sensations, add an important dimension to learning sessions at historical sites. Drawing on observations of primary school pupils visiting historical sites in Sweden, and interviews with pupils, teachers, and site educators following the visits, this study investigates in which ways haptics affect how young pupils learn history. Three aspects of haptics are identified as important to learning in history education: touch, internally felt bodily sensations, and visual and auditory senses, the latter interacting with haptics. The study argues that visits to historical sites help pupils develop their historical understanding through knowledge by acquaintance. It also emphasises that for historical learning to take place, the experience must be put in relation to a historical frame of reference.

This article explores, through group-interviews and in terms of peer-culture, the ways in which pupils negotiate experiences from school-excursions to three heritage sites, Vadstena Castle, a former Royal Castle connected to the royal dynasty of Vasa; Witches’ forest, the place for interrogation by torture and executions of nine women, accused of witchcraft in 1617, and Linköping Cathedral Ages at the visitor programs “Middle Ages in the Cathedral”. The article, which is part of a larger project on learning processes and historical sites, investigates how pupils collectively load the heritage site with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections can have on the pupils’ process of stock of knowledge. The following research questions are asked: What kind of affections are evoked? Which situations and circumstances during the visit at the heritage site, mould impressions and immersion in the collective recalling?

By drawing on affection, peer culture and critical heritage studies’ verb “heritaging”, we have studied how the pupils collectively load the heritage sites with values reflected in immersion by affections, and what significance immersion of affections have on the pupils’ process of historical understanding. To understand how the heritage site in terms of a material and physical place loaded with narratives of the past affects the children, the analysis aimed to explore under what circumstances the immersion took place.

The article localize three situations that led to surprise and thereby friction between the expected (the stock of knowledge) and what was experienced at the site (the immediate experience), namely conflicts caused by expectations and experiences at the site, conflict caused by replicas in relation to originals, and finally conflict between lived experiences and insights at the site.