This presentation will provide a practice-based account of heritage conservation as a set of research methods that contribute to broader debates about the past and concerns about our futures. It will explore the principles of the conservation discipline within a framing of colonialism and the need for additional methodological tools that go beyond the technical ability of heritage to merely present something of the past to be experienced in the present.

In addition to the opportunities provided by conservation’s forensic encounter with the vestigial remains of the past, this will consider the implications of prioritizing either materials, values, or people in heritage conservation policy and practice. Decolonizing, transculturalism, and post-humanism will be presented as tools to challenge the Authorized Heritage Discourse. The potential of critical speculative methods will be presented as ways to highlight the (un)certainty of authorizing knowledge production in providing stories of the past and the future.

The implications of conserving heritage in the environmental humanities of the Anthropocene will be examined as a response to the projected rupture of time ahead of us, rather than behind us in the past. This will plot a shift in the focus of heritage practice in its salvage paradigm, replacing a response to the absence created in the progress towards a new optimistic future, with action to salvage sufficient resources to sustain human populations in their anticipated future broken worlds. This enables heritage practice to provide new ways to propose implausible but real nows, and realizable preferable futures.