Areas
Profile
Krupa Rajangam is a humanities-based scholar and heritage management expert.
In her research she draws on anthropology and social geography to interpret nature-culture conservation practice; particularly the construction of socio-cultural place identities, urban-rural geographies, and tourism imaginaries. She approaches her work through an interdisciplinary and community-engaged lens.
Her overlapping professional, research, and teaching interest is in critical theory-driven, experiential field-based education adopting interdisciplinary methods. She runs an immersive field school (in a historical cultural landscape) that offers a hands-on understanding of this approach. She teaches courses ranging from digital heritage and place making, community and oral histories to masters dissertation, urban heritage management, and research methodology, including ethnographic approaches and ethics.
She is Founder-Director of the non-institutional collective Saythu…Linking People and Heritage. And she consults for the Archaeological Survey of India, private clients, and heritage bodies.
She takes public dissemination of research seriously and continues to popularize more interpretive understandings of heritage and conservation amongst diverse stakeholders through multimedia output and culture mapping exercises. You can access some of the output on https://linktr.ee/KrupaRajangam.
Project Abstract:
My work at UPenn builds on my long-term engagement with Hampi World Heritage Site, India, both as practitioner and scholar. The project will contribute to global debates on archaeological and heritage place-making, social geography and social violence, as outcomes of UNESCO World Heritage inscription, boundary demarcation, and management. It will examine conservation, contestation and conflict at World Heritage Sites, through the lens of urbanism. The need for such studies is pressing as many iconic and seemingly peri-urban Asian heritage sites are typically regulated and planned through the lens of urbanism, often resulting in spatial disjunctures and social tensions.