1 Keeping Critical Heritage Studies Critical: Why "Post-Humanism" and the "New Materialism" Are Not So Critical Gary Campbell & Laurajane Smith Australian National University Unpublished conference paper. Given at the third Association of Critical Heritage Studies Conference, Montreal, Canada, June 2016. When we wrote the manifesto of the ACHS we were keen to promote a strong sense of critical engagement with social justice issues, and to encourage people to draw on the wider social sciences to study museums and heritage. We are heartened that so many people have embraced the ACHS, and that the ACHS conferences have been such a success, and intellectually and socially happy and exciting places to be. Having said that, we also have some reservations about some of the theoretical sources that are being drawn on as CHS develops, the way they are being taken up, and the consequences this may be having for developing a critical approach to the issues of social justice we hope to promote. What we are going to do in this paper is to outline the problems we have with these theoretical borrowings from what has loosely been termed the New Materialism or Post-Humanism. In some ways our discussion is impressionistic, but we would like to look at the ‘local’ influences these borrowings have, and the flavour they may impart to the work we do. We would also like to ask some questions about what sort of questions and themes might be foreclosed, and what that might mean for ‘being critical’.