The Cultural Heritage Leadership (hereafter CHL) course focuses on developing skills required from an effective leader in the cultural heritage domain. By effective leadership, we mean a people-centered, future-looking, and data-driven approach with a clear vision in which heritage plays a crucial role. The course aims to develop skills to communicate and facilitate that vision within a heritage-led organization or a project and build a relationship with all stakeholders, which leads to a shared goal.
The course combines leadership theory and practices through teaching with case studies. Theoretical knowledge in the field is needed to be able to think critically from a variety of perspectives and to make good decisions – all our theoretical classes are practice-oriented in this respect. Case studies are used to examine the applicability of theories, identify their explanatory potential and limitations.
In this course, CHL refers to accomplishing heritage-related goals through the direction of human assistance. The course focuses on transformative leadership, which contributes to generating non-monetary and monetary values, empowers citizens, leads to social changes, facilitates the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and contributes to the sustainable development of organizations and related territories and communities. It combines an analysis of society’s interests and needs with those of the cultural heritage assets.
The fundamental concept of the CHL course lies in the use of heritage as a resource for development, which, at the same time, secures the sustainability of heritage. The management of these processes requires highly motivated experts with interdisciplinary educational backgrounds. Students attending the course will understand how heritage can be a resource and a lever of structural change at the local, national, regional, and global levels. It focuses on actors who are instrumental in conceiving and creating new heritage-based development paths and forges links between different institutional and national contexts. Overall, the course will help the students to prepare themselves to take various leading roles connected to different actions or research projects, organizations, or communities in the field of heritage.
- Instructors: Volodymyr Kulikov, Zsuzsanna Szalka