IMAMUR HOSSAIN
IMAMUR HOSSAIN
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Critical Heritage & Built Environment | UNESCO WHIPIC Fellow | Commonwealth Scholar
My research examines how critical heritage theory, architectural inquiry, and digital spatial methods can be brought together to develop more polyphonic, community-situated forms of heritage interpretation in the Global South.
Research and Practice Focus
Polyphonic Heritage Interpretation and Community-Situated Meaning-Making
Contested Built Environments, Dissonant Memory, and Spatial Politics
Critical Digital Heritage and Spatial Narrative Methodologies
Urban Heritage, Power, and Interpretive Justice in the Global South
Heritage Ethics, Temporalities, and Futures of Built Environment Practice
Current Appointments
Coordinator, Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN), Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS)
Coordinator, International Centre for Development and Environmental Studies (ICDES)
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Sonargaon University
Managing Editor, Journal of Built Environments in the Global South (JBEGS)
About Me
I work at the intersection of critical heritage studies, the built environment, and spatial interpretation, examining how polyphonic meaning-making is produced, contested, and governed within heritage environments, particularly in post-colonial Global South contexts.
My research asks how heritage interpretation can accommodate plurality while preserving interpretive tension. Rather than resolving dissonant and underrepresented narratives into singular accounts, I treat them as constitutive of the heritage environment itself. I approach heritage not as static fabric but as an ongoing process embedded in spatial practice, power relations, and cultural memory.
Across research, teaching, editorial work, and collaborative initiatives, I engage with community-centred inquiry, architectural documentation, digital heritage practice, and heritage governance. Recent research includes the Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol (SNIP), developed during my UNESCO WHIPIC Fellowship in Korea.
My current scholarship is grounded in South Asian contexts, particularly Bangladesh, while engaging broader debates on heritage interpretation and digital mediation across the Global South. I am currently preparing doctoral research and looking forward to inquiring into these methodological and interpretive questions further, within architectural and humanities-based research environments where critical heritage theory and spatial practice are developed together.
Recent Research Activities: Fellowship Research at UNESCO WHIPIC
Heritage interpretation operates on an unexamined assumption that meaning resides in fabric, awaiting extraction. We document, we model, we interpret. Each act reinforcing the position that heritage is object rather than relation, noun rather than verb.
My research, while at UNESCO-WHIPIC, Korean fieldwork, and over half a decade of community-engaged research in Bangladesh, starts from a different premise: that heritage is fundamentally relational, and that the principles affirming this already exist but lack operational methodology. I work at the junction between critical heritage theory and deployable practice, between interpretive plurality and the institutional systems that must sustain it. Asking not whether polyphonic interpretation matters, but how it is actually done.
The tools are ready. The orientation is what shifts.
SNIP: Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol. Developed during fieldwork at Catholic gongso sites in Korea's Naepo region, SNIP argues that polyphonic heritage interpretation fails not at the level of principle but at the level of protocol. It proposes a sequencing method in which photogrammetric documentation and spatial analysis are structured to hold multiple community narratives without collapsing them into a single account. SNIP is a dialogic meaning-making intervention, designed to be usable by practitioners and early-career professionals already working within fabric-centric documentation regimes.
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