The Colombo Institute for Human Sciences became an institutional partner of the project, ‘Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia’ (HaP) from May 1, 2025. This partnership extends HaP’s research network in South Asia and builds on the long-standing academic collaboration between Dr. Sasanka Perera, one of HaP’s principal investigators and the chairperson of Colombo Institute with colleagues and institutions in Europe and South Asia.
Colombo Institute contributes to HaP’s ‘Decolonisation’ theoretical strand to examine the enduring colonial entanglements that shape cultural heritage in South Asia. The current research focus is on pilgrim sites and practices in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, exploring how cultural heritage is experienced and interpreted through critical and decolonial perspectives.
About the project: Heritage as Placemaking: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia (HaP) is a four-year research project that investigates the role of ‘placemaking’ in shaping, narrating, contesting, and erasing cultural heritage in South Asia. It is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
HaP is composed of an interdisciplinary, international research team based across Europe and South Asia whose collaborative work is broadly located at the intersections of the fields of critical heritage studies, new area studies, and transcultural urbanization studies. The project’s research agenda is unified by a commitment to four central theoretical strands: decolonization, erasure, bureaucracy, and commoning.
More details on its website: https://heritageasplacemaking.com/
