In December 2018, a small group stemming out of the Lapland’s Dark Heritage group were lucky enough to gain a University of Helsinki Future Fund grant to develop our ideas in new but related and interesting directions.

The Legacies of Conflict project sees members of the original Lapland’s Dark Heritage collective team up with specialists from the Universities of Ghent and Utrecht. We focus on three main areas: conducting analysis of archival aerial photographs and lidar data to create a meaningful survey of Second World War remains; analysing this data against the official heritage site records for the region to trace the selective heritagization of this conflict, and mapping personal stories and memories connected to Second World War sites. Our case study area for this small project is Kilpisjärvi.

The University of Helsinki Future Fund is a seedcorn grant intended to help researchers develop their ideas to see if a larger project is possible later on. So, we hope that we will be able to open out the Legacies of Conflict project in the future.