IMAMUR HOSSAIN
IMAMUR HOSSAIN
Embedded Files
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. My research examines the gap between heritage as an institutionally regulated narrative and heritage as lived, inhabited and negotiated community space, particularly in post-colonial Global South contexts. At its centre is the uneven distribution of interpretive authority: who can name significance, whose knowledge enters the record, and whose remains peripheral.
My research asks how heritage interpretation can accommodate plurality while preserving interpretive tension. I do not seek to reconcile dissonant and underrepresented accounts into a single authorised story. I treat difference, contradiction and uneven power as constitutive of the heritage environment itself. Heritage, in this work, is not static fabric but an ongoing process embedded in spatial practice, cultural memory and changing relations of authority.
Across research, teaching, editorial work and collaborative initiatives, I connect community-engaged inquiry, architectural spatial analysis, documentation, digital heritage practice and heritage governance. This is not simply a movement from physical to digital heritage. It is an inquiry into what different recording systems make visible, what they exclude, and how those exclusions might be challenged.
My scholarship is grounded in Bangladesh and South Asia while engaging wider debates across the Global South. The sites, institutions and technologies have changed across my work. The central problem has not how can heritage records recognise plural spatial meanings without separating them from the people who produce, inhabit and contest them?
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.
Google Sites
Report abuse