“…feeling entitled to say you are from a place that you didn’t grow up, but you chose to be a part of it, I think that is extraordinarily powerful.” – Meghann Ormond
A year ago, Hiraeth was invited to participate in a session on “Whose Heritages Matter” during a conference at Wageningen University in the east of the Netherlands. Meghann Ormond, Associate Professor in Cultural Geography at Wageningen, speaks about her own heritage, from her two passport countries, the U.S. and Portugal, as well as the Netherlands, where she has made her home for the past eight years, and other countries that have touched her life.
Meghann’s own identity has been shaped by both her own travels around the world and her multifaceted family history, including her mother’s search for her birth parents on two continents. Through this experience, she realised:
“We are all inheritors of extraordinarily transnational stories.”
Heritage from Below is an acknowledgement that the everyday stories and lives of ordinary people should be included as a part of history. Meghann started the Heritage from Below Educational and Research Collective (HERC) to bring together cultural heritage and history scholars, practitioners and educators to help children of all backgrounds feel that their history and culture are important and recognised as part of a larger whole.
This episode also features music by Ketsa (copyright) http://ketsamusic.com/ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License
