Hosted annually every July at Danube University Krems, the DAC Summer School is a dynamic platform exploring the intersections of cultural heritage, technology, and sustainability. Organized by the Department for Arts and Cultural Studies in collaboration with in scope GmbH, this event brings together professionals, academics, and practitioners from various disciplines to critically engage with contemporary issues in game studies, collecting, archiving, and curating practices.
The 2026 edition, themed Who Cares: Collecting, preserving, and curating in museums, archives, and organizations, invites participants to explore discourses, practices, ethics, and politics of care in contexts of collecting, preserving, restoring, curating, interpreting, and managing or organizing, by asking:
- Who cares for objects, materials, data, and their histories – also in view of the social mission and responsibility of heritage institutions? How are decisions made about what is preserved, restored, or allowed to decay?
- How do we deal with fragile, ageing, damaged, repressed, or illegible materials—documents, artworks, artifacts with digital methods?
- How do we ensure the preservation of digitized records and how do develop sustainable practice for managing born-digital texts and artifacts?
- What does “curating” or “restoring” mean from a perspective of care and advocacy for long overlooked agents, materials, or practices?
- How can we make mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion visible—also in restoration practices, conservation priorities, strategies, and heritage politics?
- How do organizations collect, maintain, repair, and sometimes erase knowledge, memories, and data and how can such collective memories and repositories be restored and investigated?
- How do climate change, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity transform conservation and restoration practices, and which strategies already exist? (e.g., climate proofing collections, dealing with mold, humidity, pests, extreme weather events)
- How do care concepts and practices differ across cultural heritage institutions, companies, communities, or activist groups?
- How can the societal actors be actively involved in care practices, especially through participatory approaches and/or Citizen Science?
