September 20, 2012

Print Culture Speaker Series Lecture

I was honored to be asked to give a lecture on Sept 18th in the SFU Department of English’s Print Culture Speaker Series. I gave a talk called “Cultural Heritage on the Web: Applied Digital Visual Anthropology and Local Cultural Property Rights Discourse”, which draws on a forthcoming article to be published in the International Journal of Cultural Property. Thank you to the organizer, Dr. Margaret Linley, and to the everyone who came out and asked many insightful and thought provoking questions. This has been, and continues to be,  an excellent series of speakers–here is the series website.

And, here is the abstract of my talk:

The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage specifies that communities are to be full partners in efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. Yet the notion of safeguarding has been complicated by the politics and mechanisms of digital circulation. Based on fieldwork in British Columbia and Thailand, I show that community-based productions of multimedia aimed at documenting, transmitting, and revitalizing intangible heritage are productive spaces in which local cultural property rights discourses are initiated and articulated. In both locations, digital heritage and local control over its production are central in debates about cultural property and circulation over the Internet. I argue that digital heritage initiatives can support decision making about the circulation––or restriction––of digital cultural heritage while drawing attention to the complexities of safeguarding heritage in the digital age.