About the seminar
The relationship between human rights and culture is among the most complicated issues there is. Caretakers of past and present cultural patrimony scratch their heads when designing monuments that are supposed to commemorate individual, communitarian and national interests and identities, at the same time, and moreover reflects outstanding universal values. Anthropologists scratch their heads when exploring the complexities of individual versus collective agency, not only in social and political life as it evolves, but also, and not least, as the resulting interaction generate culture that later might be celebrated as patrimony.
The consolation is that the actual construction of cultural patrimony offers a way of analysing what happens at such intersections. ICOMOS, which is an advisory committee to UNESCO, concerned with the nomination and naming of world heritage sites, has established a special Working Group for discussing such issues, focussing on how to reconcile the various political interests that meet and clash in this work in a global world where international human rights law is becoming ever more important as a regulatory framework and a political tool.
Part of this work is a series of seminars where academic specialists in human rights have teamed up with heritage practitioners to discuss the intersections between culture and rights. Practitioners have come from Europe, America and Africa and on the academic side Norwegian and Danish anthropologists Stener Ekern (NCHR) and Peter Bille Larsen (University of Lucerne) have provided the input. At the seminar which took place in Estonia in 2021 Bille Larsen and Ekern invited the participants and others involved in the field of world heritage to contribute to a special issue of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights.
Program
14.15-14.25 Welcome (Kjetil Mujezinovic Larsen)
14.25-14.50 "World Heritage and Human Rights" - introducing the Special Issue (Stener Ekern)
14.50-15.15 "Heritage Communities and Human Rights" - presentation of a case study (Margaret Comer)
15.15-15.40 Reactions and reflections (Andrew Fagan)
15.40-16.00 Discussion
About the speakers
- Stener Ekern is professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of Oslo.
- Margaret Comer is a postdoctoral researcher at Tallinn University.
- Andrew Fagan is Director of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex.
- Kjetil Mujezinovic Larsen is professor of law at the University of Oslo, and editor-in-chief of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights.
Unable to attend in-person?
The seminar will be live-streamed on Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/62377652997