IMAMUR HOSSAIN
IMAMUR HOSSAIN
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Interpretive Framework Architect | Critical Heritage & Built Environment | UNESCO WHIPIC Fellow | Commonwealth Scholar
Designing protocol-driven interpretation systems for contested heritage contexts—translating polyphonic community narratives into institutionally usable frameworks, with a focus on the Global South.
Research and Practice Focus
Protocol-driven heritage interpretation systems for contested built environments
Polyphonic and community-engaged interpretation
Urban heritage, power, and meaning-making in the Global South
Documentation-led interpretation using digital spatial infrastructures
Ethics, Temporality, and Futures of Heritage 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
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 of the post-colonial Global South contexts.
My research interrogates the limits of authorized, material-centric heritage paradigms, foregrounding dissonant, marginalized, and politically stranded pasts to ask how interpretation can accommodate plurality without collapsing difference into institutional consensus. I approach heritage not as static fabric, but as an interpretive process embedded in spatial practice, power relations, and cultural memory.
Methodologically, my work develops operational frameworks that translate critical heritage theory into spatial and digital practice. Through community-engaged inquiry, architectural documentation, and immersive 3D interpretive environments, I advance the Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol (SNIP) a structured methodology for integrating community-situated narratives into digitally documented heritage settings.
My scholarship is grounded in South Asian contexts, particularly Bangladesh, while engaging broader debates on heritage interpretation, epistemic justice, and digital mediation across the Global South. I am currently preparing for doctoral research that further theorizes and refines these methodological and interpretive questions within interdisciplinary architectural and humanities-based research environments.
Recent Research Activities
Heritage sites hold multiple, often conflicting meanings, yet prevailing interpretation methods lack systematic ways to present these voices spatially without collapsing them into expert-curated consensus. As a UNESCO Fellow at WHIPIC (2025), I developed the Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol (SNIP) to address this methodological gap, anchoring community narratives directly to architectural locations while preserving interpretive tension.
SNIP was tested through fieldwork at Catholic gongso sites across Korea’s Naepo region, working with elderly believers whose memories of persecution, resistance, and faith transmission remain spatially embedded. This work builds on over half a decade of participatory research in Bangladesh, including engagement with more than 115 community members to surface heritage narratives systematically erased from official accounts.
SNIP: Spatial Narratives Integration Protocol
Heritage Interpretation Research
Leading Research on Evolving Cultural Dynamics
Community Engagement
Academic and Social Explorations
Blogs/Fieldnotes
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