Oliver Smithies Lecture: Dreaming Spires and Colonial Nightmares: Cultural Heritage, Human Flourishing and Social Justice

Essential to the character of Oxford its cultural heritage – from dreaming spires to its beautiful quadrangles and magnificent halls. Yet that heritage is implicated in a history of colonialism and inequality. I propose to consider cultural heritage through the lens of social justice. This involves a candid reckoning with the historic injustice instantiated in dominant heritage narratives, but also how heritage might be understood in a way that contributes to social justice, understood in an expansive sense of furthering human flourishing.