Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property

The WG announces the current issue of Traditiones on the topic of “Heritage on the Margins? Central and Eastern European Perspectives”, the upcoming keynote by Charlotte Engman at the Museums and Emotions conference in Antwerp, Belgium on May 15th and the published chapter “The rusga parade: when the subaltern shouts – and claims back the heritage city”, in Cultural Heritage and Mobility from a Multisensory Perspective, by Paula Mota Santo. Furthermore, it reports on various events and activities of UNESCO.

The SIEF Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property (CHP) was established at the 2008 Derry Congress. Our interests and activities encompass heritage policy, theory, and practice. We address multiple dimensions of cultural heritage, including its symbolic and economic power, political implications and engagement with civil society.
Any SIEF member is welcome to join our working group. To join, send an email to Carley Williams and Robert Baron, and please register for the Working Group mailing list online to ensure that you receive our WG-related communications.

We’re looking forward to seeing you soon at the SIEF Congress in Aberdeen. Our Working Group business meeting will take place on Wednesday, June 4th, 13:00 – 14:00 UK time (GMT + 1). If you can’t come to Aberdeen, please join us online. Stay tuned for the remote meeting link and agenda which will be sent to the CHP email list in May.

As ever, CHP members are involved in a number of important heritage related activities and publications:

Heritage on the Margins? Central and Eastern European Perspectives is the topic of the current thematic issue of Traditiones, edited by Špela Ledinek Lozej and Nataša Rogelja Caf. It links discussions of the multidisciplinary research program at the ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia) on heritage-making processes with case studies presented at the “Heritage on the Margins?” held in November 2023 in Ljubljana. The focus of this thematic issue is heritage formation and the performative influence of heritage in minority, remote, linguistic, industrial, (post)imperial, (post)socialist, and otherwise marginalized settings. The thread that runs through the thematic issue highlights explicit or implicit distance from the core European narratives. The articles reflect on such questions as: How to think about marginality and centrality from within this part of the world? What can be gained by approaching European heritage and memory from CEE? What are the inner margins of CEE?

Charlotte Engman of Umeå University will deliver the keynote address at the Museums and Emotions conference in Antwerp on May 15th. Her article, She’s Just Trying to Destroy Our Swedish Heritage: Facing hate in museum education, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Museum Education, examines the challenges museums face amid growing political disillusionment and extremism. The article aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how polarization is experienced and navigated in museum education, arguing that museums must raise awareness of how public hostility operates within their institutions.

Paula Mota Santo of Fernando Pessoa University contributed a chapter, “The rusga parade: when the subaltern shouts – and claims back the heritage city”, in Cultural Heritage and Mobility from a Multisensory Perspective, edited by Karolina Nikielska-Sekuła, Karolina and Magdalena Banaszkiewicz, which was published by) Routledge in 2024.

On October 17th 2024, The UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance at the University of Warsaw co-organized with UNESCO’s Living Heritage Entity a webinar on AI and Intangible Cultural Heritage. It delved into harnessing AI’s potential while mitigating risks for ICH bearers. And April 3rd - 4th 2025, in Kraków, it presented a conference organized in the framework Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Safe Cultural Heritage - European Challenges in times of war and crisis. Upcoming activities include the Second Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies Central and Eastern European Chapter, August 27th − 29th, 2025 in Warsaw and a publication by Hanna Schreiber, Twenty Years of the UNESCO 2003 Convention from the Implementation of the Convention in Poland (2022-2023) in the Handbook on Intangible Cultural Practices as Global Strategies for the Future, edited by Christoph Wulf and published by Springer.

SIEF had a robust presence during the annual Intergovernmental meeting of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage, 19COM, which took place in Asuncion, Paraguay from 1-6 December 2024. It organized a session, “What Can Be Done With All Those Inventoried Materials? - Archiving for ICH Safeguarding” for the ICH NGO Forum series of side events, addressing the urgent need for archiving the huge amount of documentation being carried out by ICH Programs worldwide. The session was designed to educate ICH practitioners about how to make documentation accessible, secure, well organized as enduring resources for contemporary communities and future generations. It emphasized the importance of using existing archives of folklore, ethnology, ethnomusicology and anthropology as valuable resources for contemporary ICH safeguarding. The speakers included SIEF members Maryna Chernyavska, Sophie Elpers, Robert Baron, Ioana Baskerville and Carley Williams as well as ethnologist Sofie Veramme and ethnomusicologists Subha Chaudhuri and Susana Sardo. The session was co-sponsored by International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, Permanent UNESCO Delegation of Romania to UNESCO, Permanent Delegation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to UNESCO and the Estonia UNESCO Chair, SIEF member Kristin Kuutma.

CHP members are deeply involved in UNESCO ICH activities as experts on states party delegations, members of the Evaluation Body and as active participants in the ICH NGO Forum and its Working Groups. In December Robert Baron completed his term as President of the ICH NGO Forum.

Since SIEF is an NGO accredited to the ICH NGO Forum, any SIEF member can join a Working Group by emailing a WG Chair, listed on the ICH NGO Forum website. The Working Groups include Conflict and Displacement, Gender and Intellectual Property, Global Results Framework, ICH Climate Change and the Environment, ICH NGOs and Research, Legal and Policy Development and More Balanced Geographical Representation of NGOs.
The 2025 annual meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee, 20COM, will take place in New Delhi, India, 7-13 December 2025. SIEF members may attend in person, or follow the proceedings on the UNESCO ICH web site.

Activities of the ICH NGO Forum appear in its newsletter, on the Facebook group: ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage and Civil Society’ and the LinkedIn group: ‘ICH NGO Forum’.

Robert Baron and Carley Williams, CHP Co-Chairs

18th Annual Meeting of the South-East European Experts Network on Intangible Cultural Heritage (Warsaw October 2024). Group photo of the participants from the second day of the meeting, taken in the Prof. Jan Baszkiewicz Lecture Hall at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw.

Group photo of the participants from the third day of the meeting, taken in front of the Praga Museum of Warsaw.
Credit: Projekt Kreatywny Michał Radochoński