The Sustainable Heritage Initiative

In recent years, scholars from ethnomusicology, folkloristics, anthropology and other disciplines have critiqued the UNESCO paradigm of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding as leading to dispossession and reifying once-dynamic traditions. These critiques have become even important during the grant period, as the United Kingdom has just formally signed the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2024. In response, “cultural sustainability” has emerged as a promising alternative through promoting a holistic and dynamic approach to intangible cultural traditions. In the first stage of the FLF, I have worked with Tibetan communities in China to develop new approaches to cultural sustainability. In this process, I have isolated the role of community sustainability, and the efforts of individual culture brokers as essential in ensuring the vitality of different cultural practices, while also leading a series of community workshops aimed at introducing cultural sustainability theory and new digital technologies for cultural preservation and transmission to culture workers in China. With renewal funding, I will extend this research to see how lessons from China’s robust legal and administrative framework for recognising and managing intangible cultural heritage and how perspectives on cultural sustainability can shape future heritage interventions both in China, and in the United Kingdom, as it navigates its own obligations under the UNESCO Convention. During the renewal period, then, my primary goals are: 1) Improving Tibetan cultural vitality both inside China and within its global diaspora communities, 2) refining new methods for encouraging cultural sustainability through collaboration, digital technologies, and adding participatory action research, 3) understanding the question of cultural sustainability as it relates to diasporic and exile communities, 4) Better theorising the role of individual agents and their efforts in supporting cultural sustainability, 5) creating online and offline resources for communities in China, and beyond to document, preserve, and transmit intangible cultural tradition, and 6) introducing both the theoretical and methodological approaches pioneered in this project to policy makers in China, the UK, and UNESCO. To accomplish this, I anticipate engaging in four main activities. First, participatory action research with Tibetan tradition bearers in China will test new methods for providing valuable, culturally- and contextually appropriate support for the documentation, transmission, and spread of intangible cultural traditions. Second, collaborations with the Tibetan diaspora community, will co-develop impactful interventions in cultural transmission for Tibetan and other diasporic communities in the UK and the West, whilst also helping to advance theorisation of cultural sustainability in diasporic contexts. Third, the creation of English, Chinese, and Tibetan language written and video content to support training needs and sharing findings of diverse communities, and finally in linking with both national and international policy bodies, we aim to use our findings to shape broader understandings of cultural sustainability. In sum, through continuing to pioneer the theorisation of cultural sustainability, and developing methods for its meaningful implementation, this project will continue to see this research team established as a global leader in an increasingly important field of research, while achieving meaningful impact into the presents and futures of minoritised communities in China, the UK, and around the globe, and the intangible cultural traditions they maintain.