Viktorija L A Čeginskas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3065705 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Viktorija L A Čeginskas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Viktorija L A |
| FAMILY NAME | Čeginskas |
| SIGNATURE | ČEGINSKAS V L A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Jyväskylä |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5794-9503 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
(Im)material Connections. The Role of Adopted Objects in Creating Intergenerational Continuity
This study examines how material objects sustain family relationships in contexts of displacement and disruption, focusing on two women in Sweden whose parents and grandparents fled Estonia during the Second World War. I investigate how materiality intertwines with memory and imagination, demonstrating that objects—even when their origins are unclear or initially unknown—possess mnemonic and imaginative qualities that help materialize stories and…
Poly-spatial experiences of the past at European cultural heritage sites
This article explores ways in which visitors both feel and reflect on the past as part of their affective and interpretive practices of meaning-making in, of, and within heritage spaces. We aim to describe a form of subjective and affective experience that links to moments of reflection, which can create a new understanding of the site’s multi-layered past and change visitors’ understanding of the pasts the heritage sites represent. Our examples …
Dialogue in and as European heritage
In this article, we scrutinize the use and institutionalization of the concept of ‘dialogue’ in the cultural politics of the European Union. Our focus is on how dialogue is understood in the context of the European Union’s flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label, that aims to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to the Union. Since heritage has gained increasing prominence in the European Union international relations, we also di…
Dialogic approach in the EU’s international cultural relations: Joint Eunic-EU delegation projects as heritage diplomacy
Culture and cultural heritage have become central aspects in the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy that increasingly emphasizes dialogue and people-to-people connections as the basis for international cultural relations. This article explores 11 projects jointly facilitated by the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) and EU Delegations in nine countries located in Europe, Africa, and South America as part of a strategic coope…
EU heritage diplomacy: Entangled external and internal cultural relations
Cultural heritage is an expanding yet contested area of EU policymaking, which has recently been identified as an instrument for EU international cultural relations. In this article, drawing from critical heritage studies and recent scholarship on heritage diplomacy, we see external and internal cultural relations as blurred and deeply entangled in EU heritage policies. Empirically, we focus on the European Heritage Label (EHL), a central EU heri…
Introduction: Reflecting on heritage diplomacy
Conceptualisation of heritage diplomacy in scholarship
Heritage diplomacy is a recent concept and a new area of interest in the expanding scope of diplomacy. The concept is explored with various epistemological foci and theoretical frameworks in Western scholarship. It is often used to describe joint international projects or government initiatives abroad for preserving tangible cultural heritage. Several recent studies link heritage diplomacy to attempts to develop reciprocal relations between count…
Conclusions: Europe’s Lived Space
In this book we explored how the participants in EU cultural initiatives construct notions of Europe and the 'European' , what concrete meanings they give to them, and how they build their own relations to Europe. Hence, the focus was the construction of Europe and belonging to it from below. The analysis of our three cases, the European Capital of Culture (ECOC), the European Citizen Campus (ECC), and the European Heritage Label (EHL), clearly s…
Cross Analysis of the Case Studies
Our methodological innovation, ethnography of Europeanization, offers a multi-dimensional and intersectional approach to how people construct Europe and their notion of belonging to it at different social and cultural locations. We explore this in data sets from three EU cultural initiatives -the European Capital of Culture (ECOC), the European Citizen Campus (ECC), and the European Heritage Label (EHL). In our three case studies, various social …
Politics of Belonging: Concepts and Method
We focus on studying citizens' subjective sense of belonging as well as how their construction of belonging interacts with agendas to enhance it in and through EU cultural initiatives, which we consider as politics of belonging. We understand politics of belonging in EU cultural policy as constructing and conveying notions about Europe and the 'European' to a wider public through diverse discursive, narrative, and cultural resources, which help t…
Case 2: The European Citizen Campus
In this chapter, we focus on the implementation of the EU's cultural programmes and explore what kinds of conceptions of Europe are constructed in the framework of an individual EU project. The European Citizen Campus (ECC) received funding from the Culture programme between 2013 and 2015. EU projects are used as channels to engage participants in the Union's activities, and as such, they can be seen as core elements of the EU's politics of belon…
Case 1: The European Capital of Culture
The European Capital of Culture (ECOC) is the longest running EU cultural initiative with a strong emphasis on foregrounding common culture in Europe, promoting European cultural narratives, supporting the cooperation of European cultural actors, and activating Europeans to participate in cultural creation and reception. This action forms our first case study. As discussed in Chapter 3, the macro-level policy discourse of the action seeks to cons…
Case 3: The European Heritage Label
The EU's most recent flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label (EHL), contributes to the politics of belonging in EU cultural policy by seeking to form 'a community of Europeans' with an emphasis on common values and a shared past in Europe. As the EHL was developed with the aim to strengthen "European citizens' belonging to the Union", heritage sites have been awarded the Label on grounds of their "European significance" and contribu…
EU Cultural Policy: Europe from Above
Focus on Two Agendas
Politics of Memory and Oblivion in the European Context: Critical Perspectives
Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research: Ethnography with a Twist
Challenges and Solutions in Ethnographic Research: Ethnography with a Twist seeks to rethink ethnography ‘outside the box’ of its previous tradition and to develop ethnographic methods by critically discussing the process, ethics, impact and knowledge production in ethnographic research. This interdisciplinary edited volume argues for a ‘twist’ that supports openness, courage, and creativity to develop and test innovative and unconventional ways …
Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage
The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of 'social Europe' by explor…
Constructing communities through heritage participation
Several collectivities use cultural heritage in their attempts to construct communities and produce identity and a sense of belonging. Since both participation and community have become core concepts in heritage making, in this chapter we explore what kind of heritage communities are constructed through the notions of participation in the context of the European Heritage Label. We analyse community building and the meanings given to communities i…
Multilevel and participatory governance of European cultural heritage in the EU
In this chapter, we examine power dynamics in the governance of European cultural heritage in the European Union, with an empirical focus on the European Heritage Label. We discuss the complex power relations inherent in the European Heritage Label by examining how the decision- and policy-making, governance, interaction, and (hierarchical) positions of different actors are manifested and dealt with in our field research data. The chapter starts …
Heritage and bordering
EUropean borders play a prominent role in the framework of European heritage. For instance, the decision of the European Heritage Label action specifies that the candidate sites have to show their cross-border or pan-European nature that goes beyond the national borders. In this chapter, we approach the European Heritage Label as a geopolitical discourse where bordering is constituted by a mixture of drawing, erasing, and crossing borders on vari…
Europe’s gendered heritage
In this chapter, we expligore the representation of gender and gendered narratives, and the ways in which they are (re)produced at the European Heritage Label sites. This European Union action still focuses on the mediation of grand European narratives that prioritize a white, male perspective, but a stronger representation of women and their perspectives is necessary in order to constitute a more inclusive and diverse conception of Europe’s past…
Economics and branding European cultural heritage
The European Union funds diverse heritage conservation and promotion activities, but its core heritage initiatives, such as the European Heritage Label, are not funding instruments. However, the European Heritage Label is intertwined with the logic of economy in diverse ways. The focus of this chapter is the economic conditions of the European Heritage Label action and how these conditions impact its implementation and power dynamic between diffe…
Heritage sites as poly-space
Based on our fieldwork experiences, we have developed the concept of poly-space to describe the co-existence of multiple moments and the interplay of different, overlapping, and intersecting spatial, temporal, affective, sensory, and cognitive experiences at a heritage site. Poly-space is not necessarily a phenomenon solely connected with heritage sites, but we became aware of it while reflectively discussing and writing about our experiences and…
Bodies in European cultural heritage
Heritage sites play an important role in generating and transmitting heritage. Human bodies featuring in the exhibitions of the European Heritage Label sites can be understood as emotionally charged sticky objects in this process. While bodies as sticky objects evoke emotions in audiences, the emotive quality of an object can also create stickiness during and long after a heritage visit. The bodies of visitors can also be understood as resonating…
Participation
For a number of decades, participation in heritage processes and practices has been increasingly addressed at various levels in cultural heritage policies and research. It has been emphasized that citizens should have a say in decisions about constructing, defining, interpreting, and representing cultural heritage. In this chapter, we analyse the dynamics of participation in the framework of the European Heritage Label and the ways in which it pr…
Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label
Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the European Heritage Label scheme.Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across ten countries at sites that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entang…
Europe from Below: Notions of Europe and the European among Participants in EU Cultural Initiatives
In this book, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Katja Mäkinen, Viktorija L. A. Čeginskas, and Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus scrutinize how people who participate in cultural initiatives funded and governed by the European Union understand the idea of Europe. The book focuses on three cultural initiatives: the European Capital of Culture, the European Heritage Label, and a European Citizen Campus project funded through the Creative Europe programme. These initiatives ar…
Being ‘the strange one’ or ‘like everybody else’: School education and the negotiation of multilingual identity
Based on first-person accounts, the negotiation of identity and belonging in 12 adults with multilingual and multicultural backgrounds is examined. The narratives show contradictory feelings towards the issue of multilinguality, which generally is experienced as a greater obstacle by multilingual adults who have predominantly gone to state schools than by adults who went to international schools. Education and different school systems play a role…
EU heritage diplomacy: Entangled external and internal cultural relations
Cultural heritage is an expanding yet contested area of EU policymaking, which has recently been identified as an instrument for EU international cultural relations. In this article, drawing from critical heritage studies and recent scholarship on heritage diplomacy, we see external and internal cultural relations as blurred and deeply entangled in EU heritage policies. Empirically, we focus on the European Heritage Label (EHL), a central EU heri…
Introduction: Reflecting on heritage diplomacy
Politics of memory and oblivion. An introduction to the special issue
This editorial sets the context for the special issue on memory and oblivion and introduces the contributions. By interpreting the contemporary uses of the past, the editorial underscores the relevance of the study of memory and oblivion in today’s heated and antagonistic debates. The politics of memory and uses of the past often coincide with efforts of reducing the past to legitimize the current authorities and tend to create new gaps in memory…
Dialogic approach in the EU’s international cultural relations: Joint Eunic-EU delegation projects as heritage diplomacy
Culture and cultural heritage have become central aspects in the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy that increasingly emphasizes dialogue and people-to-people connections as the basis for international cultural relations. This article explores 11 projects jointly facilitated by the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) and EU Delegations in nine countries located in Europe, Africa, and South America as part of a strategic coope…
Conceptualisation of heritage diplomacy in scholarship
Heritage diplomacy is a recent concept and a new area of interest in the expanding scope of diplomacy. The concept is explored with various epistemological foci and theoretical frameworks in Western scholarship. It is often used to describe joint international projects or government initiatives abroad for preserving tangible cultural heritage. Several recent studies link heritage diplomacy to attempts to develop reciprocal relations between count…
Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage
The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of 'social Europe' by explor…
Challenges for Creating Visibility of European Cultural Heritage
The European Heritage Label (EHL) is a recent flagship heritage action of the European Union and focuses on the European dimension of Europe’s histo- ry and heritage as part of the Union’s cultural policy. One of the central con- cerns of the EU’s cultural policy is to generate a sense of belonging and iden- tity among European citizens. While efficient promotion of the visibility of the EHL among European audiences could be expected correspondin…
Language learning experience in school context and metacognitive awareness of multilingual children
What is the influence of a language learning experience (LLE) in a school context on the metacognitive development of children? To answer that question, we presented 54 multilingual preschoolers with two movie clips and examined their reactions to an exolingual situation of communication. These preschoolers were aged four and a half to six and a half. We observed how they treated the reception of information during situations of communication in …
Being ‘the strange one’ or ‘like everybody else’: School education and the negotiation of multilingual identity
Based on first-person accounts, the negotiation of identity and belonging in 12 adults with multilingual and multicultural backgrounds is examined. The narratives show contradictory feelings towards the issue of multilinguality, which generally is experienced as a greater obstacle by multilingual adults who have predominantly gone to state schools than by adults who went to international schools. Education and different school systems play a role…
Teaching Archaeological Heritage Management. Towards a Change in Paradigms
The concept of archaeological heritage management (AHM) has been key to wider archaeological research and preservation agendas for some decades. Many universities and other education providers now offer what is best termed heritage management education (HME) in various forms. The emphasis is commonly on archaeological aspects of heritage in a broad sense and different terms are often interchangeable in practice. In an innovative working-conferenc…
Playfulness and Freedom of Choice in Matters of Belonging
Dorothea Breier 2017. The Vague Feeling of Belonging of a Transcultural Generation. An Ethnographic Study on Germans and their Descendants in Contemporary Helsinki, Finland. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. 250 pp. Diss. ISBN 978-951-51-3811-8 (paperback). ISBN 978-951-51-3812-5 (PDF
Challenges for Creating Visibility of European Cultural Heritage
The European Heritage Label (EHL) is a recent flagship heritage action of the European Union and focuses on the European dimension of Europe’s histo- ry and heritage as part of the Union’s cultural policy. One of the central con- cerns of the EU’s cultural policy is to generate a sense of belonging and iden- tity among European citizens. While efficient promotion of the visibility of the EHL among European audiences could be expected correspondin…
Politics of memory and oblivion. An introduction to the special issue
This editorial sets the context for the special issue on memory and oblivion and introduces the contributions. By interpreting the contemporary uses of the past, the editorial underscores the relevance of the study of memory and oblivion in today’s heated and antagonistic debates. The politics of memory and uses of the past often coincide with efforts of reducing the past to legitimize the current authorities and tend to create new gaps in memory…
Constructing communities through heritage participation
Several collectivities use cultural heritage in their attempts to construct communities and produce identity and a sense of belonging. Since both participation and community have become core concepts in heritage making, in this chapter we explore what kind of heritage communities are constructed through the notions of participation in the context of the European Heritage Label. We analyse community building and the meanings given to communities i…
Multilevel and participatory governance of European cultural heritage in the EU
In this chapter, we examine power dynamics in the governance of European cultural heritage in the European Union, with an empirical focus on the European Heritage Label. We discuss the complex power relations inherent in the European Heritage Label by examining how the decision- and policy-making, governance, interaction, and (hierarchical) positions of different actors are manifested and dealt with in our field research data. The chapter starts …
Heritage and bordering
EUropean borders play a prominent role in the framework of European heritage. For instance, the decision of the European Heritage Label action specifies that the candidate sites have to show their cross-border or pan-European nature that goes beyond the national borders. In this chapter, we approach the European Heritage Label as a geopolitical discourse where bordering is constituted by a mixture of drawing, erasing, and crossing borders on vari…
Europe’s gendered heritage
In this chapter, we expligore the representation of gender and gendered narratives, and the ways in which they are (re)produced at the European Heritage Label sites. This European Union action still focuses on the mediation of grand European narratives that prioritize a white, male perspective, but a stronger representation of women and their perspectives is necessary in order to constitute a more inclusive and diverse conception of Europe’s past…
Economics and branding European cultural heritage
The European Union funds diverse heritage conservation and promotion activities, but its core heritage initiatives, such as the European Heritage Label, are not funding instruments. However, the European Heritage Label is intertwined with the logic of economy in diverse ways. The focus of this chapter is the economic conditions of the European Heritage Label action and how these conditions impact its implementation and power dynamic between diffe…
Heritage sites as poly-space
Based on our fieldwork experiences, we have developed the concept of poly-space to describe the co-existence of multiple moments and the interplay of different, overlapping, and intersecting spatial, temporal, affective, sensory, and cognitive experiences at a heritage site. Poly-space is not necessarily a phenomenon solely connected with heritage sites, but we became aware of it while reflectively discussing and writing about our experiences and…
Bodies in European cultural heritage
Heritage sites play an important role in generating and transmitting heritage. Human bodies featuring in the exhibitions of the European Heritage Label sites can be understood as emotionally charged sticky objects in this process. While bodies as sticky objects evoke emotions in audiences, the emotive quality of an object can also create stickiness during and long after a heritage visit. The bodies of visitors can also be understood as resonating…
Participation
For a number of decades, participation in heritage processes and practices has been increasingly addressed at various levels in cultural heritage policies and research. It has been emphasized that citizens should have a say in decisions about constructing, defining, interpreting, and representing cultural heritage. In this chapter, we analyse the dynamics of participation in the framework of the European Heritage Label and the ways in which it pr…
Geo-graphing European cultural heritage
In this chapter, we analyse the European Heritage Label as a geopolitical discourse in which perceptions of both European heritage and European scale are formed in relation to other spatial scales. To scrutinize these scalar relations and related hierarchies we combine critical geopolitics and critical heritage studies. Based on the practitioner interviews, we form three interlinked subject positions - EHL participant, EHL observer, and EHL creat…
Conclusions
In the conclusions, we bring together central insights of the book. Focusing on the narrative production of EUropean heritage, we discuss the nature of heritage narratives and the relationship between their inherent normative ‘smoothing’ tendency and the need to bring more diverse voices into their definition. Building on this narrative approach, we summarize key findings from the four thematic parts of the book – multilevel and participatory gov…
Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label
Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the European Heritage Label scheme.Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across ten countries at sites that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entang…
Politics of solidarity in the context of European heritage. The cases of the European Solidarity Centre and Hambach Castle
This article explores the politics of solidarity in the framework of constructing a common cultural heritage of the European Union. The politics of solidarity stems from the notion of solidarity embedded to European heritage. We use critical heritage studies as a theoretical approach that understands heritage as an inherently dissonant social construct, produced by various actors according to political, economic and social interests. The study an…
Europe from Below: Notions of Europe and the European among Participants in EU Cultural Initiatives
In this book, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Katja Mäkinen, Viktorija L. A. Čeginskas, and Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus scrutinize how people who participate in cultural initiatives funded and governed by the European Union understand the idea of Europe. The book focuses on three cultural initiatives: the European Capital of Culture, the European Heritage Label, and a European Citizen Campus project funded through the Creative Europe programme. These initiatives ar…
Conclusions: Europe’s Lived Space
In this book we explored how the participants in EU cultural initiatives construct notions of Europe and the 'European' , what concrete meanings they give to them, and how they build their own relations to Europe. Hence, the focus was the construction of Europe and belonging to it from below. The analysis of our three cases, the European Capital of Culture (ECOC), the European Citizen Campus (ECC), and the European Heritage Label (EHL), clearly s…
Cross Analysis of the Case Studies
Our methodological innovation, ethnography of Europeanization, offers a multi-dimensional and intersectional approach to how people construct Europe and their notion of belonging to it at different social and cultural locations. We explore this in data sets from three EU cultural initiatives -the European Capital of Culture (ECOC), the European Citizen Campus (ECC), and the European Heritage Label (EHL). In our three case studies, various social …
Politics of Belonging: Concepts and Method
We focus on studying citizens' subjective sense of belonging as well as how their construction of belonging interacts with agendas to enhance it in and through EU cultural initiatives, which we consider as politics of belonging. We understand politics of belonging in EU cultural policy as constructing and conveying notions about Europe and the 'European' to a wider public through diverse discursive, narrative, and cultural resources, which help t…
Case 2: The European Citizen Campus
In this chapter, we focus on the implementation of the EU's cultural programmes and explore what kinds of conceptions of Europe are constructed in the framework of an individual EU project. The European Citizen Campus (ECC) received funding from the Culture programme between 2013 and 2015. EU projects are used as channels to engage participants in the Union's activities, and as such, they can be seen as core elements of the EU's politics of belon…
Case 1: The European Capital of Culture
The European Capital of Culture (ECOC) is the longest running EU cultural initiative with a strong emphasis on foregrounding common culture in Europe, promoting European cultural narratives, supporting the cooperation of European cultural actors, and activating Europeans to participate in cultural creation and reception. This action forms our first case study. As discussed in Chapter 3, the macro-level policy discourse of the action seeks to cons…
Case 3: The European Heritage Label
The EU's most recent flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label (EHL), contributes to the politics of belonging in EU cultural policy by seeking to form 'a community of Europeans' with an emphasis on common values and a shared past in Europe. As the EHL was developed with the aim to strengthen "European citizens' belonging to the Union", heritage sites have been awarded the Label on grounds of their "European significance" and contribu…
Political science (21 works) · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation (17 works) · Cultural heritage (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · Geography (10 works) · Archaeological Research and Protection (9 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · History (8 works)