The UAB and the MNACTEC create the Chair in Research in Heritage, Technology and Society
The UAB and the National Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia (MNACTEC) have signed an agreement for the creation of the UAB-MNACTEC Chair in Research in Heritage, Technology and Society. The objective of the Chair is to promote research, teaching, training and dissemination activities in the scientific field of society and industrial heritage.
The Chair is attached to the Department of Modern and Early Modern History of the UAB. The Chair was launched in June with the formalisation of the Research and Monitoring Committee, and is organised around three main thematic axes:
- Technology, culture and environment: a renewed vision of the role of technology and industry in our societies and landscapes at multiple scales, including the major global challenges.
- Museums of science, technology and industry: an ambitious and rigorous debate on the objectives, contents and expressions of these exhibition spaces with the horizon of the 2030-2040 decade, integrating recent social demands for museum transformation through community participation.
- Heritage: new strategies to broaden the notion of industrial heritage according to international perspectives, to manage the material culture of the past and project it into the future in an open, collective, sustainable and more democratic way.
Among the activities to be carried out are the organisation of conferences in the fields of industrial, scientific and technical heritage; cataloguing, recovery and classification of scientific and technical movable heritage; the organisation of a series of seminars on "Technology, Landscape Culture and the Environment"; the creation of a web page; the organisation of a workshop on best practices in the restoration of industrial heritage; and the opening of different lines of research in all fields of industrial, scientific and technical heritage, with a vision of the past and applications for the present and future. It also aims to promote and support the work of undergraduate and master's degree students focused on this subject.
The Chair will also include the collaboration of other university departments and external entities, such as the Institut Ramon Muntaner (IRMU). The Community Oriented to Strategic Challenges (CORE) in Cultural Heritage of the UAB has been in charge of promoting the creation of the Chair at the University.
The MNACTEC is one of the three national museums recognised by the Parliament of Catalonia and its mission is to permanently show the implementation and evolution of scientific and technical advances in Catalonia, their industrial application and, especially, their social involvement and impact. Its headquarters is located in Terrassa, in one of the most emblematic factory buildings of Catalan Modernism: the Vapor Aymerich, Amat i Jover, a former textile factory designed by the architect Lluís Muncunill, built between 1907 and 1908 and declared a Cultural Asset of National Interest (BCIN) in 2019.