The World on Walcheren: Undergraduate Essays in Community and Heritage

This book tells the stories of a collection of objects that came from all over the world to the region of Walcheren in Zeeland, in the south of the Netherlands. They come in all shapes, sizes and materials: from lacquered cabinets to intricate cotton lace, and from a clove ship model to a brass-cast gold weight. They come from all over the world, from Cameroon to Indonesia and from Columbia to Syria. And they were volunteered by generous owners in the local community, who offered the stories of their possessions for research by the students of University College Roosevelt in Middelburg. This project was part of the third-year heritage course The Global Artifact of University College Roosevelt, and was organized in cooperation with the Royal Zeeland Society of Sciences.
In this community engaged learning project supported by a grant from the Community Engaged Leaning Fund of Utrecht University, the students turned interviewers and scholars. They went to dig in archives and museum collections for long-lost ancestors who travelled across the globe, analysed the characteristics of porcelain dishes, and explored the secret language of Surinamese headdresses. They compared the objects to related pieces in the collections of the Royal Zeeland Society of Sciences, and established once again that Walcheren was and is anything but a provincial backwater. Instead, it is a place where people and things come together to make a unique and close-knit community: The World on Walcheren.