Anne Lemaistre, Head of the UNESCO office in Cambodia, will visit Kent as part of the Centre for Heritage conference on ‘New Approaches to Heritage Ethics: Interdisciplinary conversations on heritage, crime, conflicts and rights’, on 23 and 24 June 2014.
The aim of the conference is to consider the three topics of crime, conflict and rights in relation to heritage in an interrelated and holistic manner. Heritage and ethics are too often considered through the lens of a single, specific theme. For instance, analyses commonly focus on separate topics like crime and heritage (e.g. unlawful excavations, vandalism and the removal or theft of cultural property), conflict and heritage (e.g. war, civil unrest, iconoclasm as well as disputes over competing visions of the past), and rights and heritage (e.g. access to cultural and socio-economic rights through heritage initiatives, in particular for disfranchised groups).
Twenty international experts from Algeria, Cambodia, England, Egypt, France, Japan, South Africa and the USA will take part in this international conference. As well as keynote speeches from Anne Lemaistre, on ‘Duryodhana: A New Era of Moral’ and Professor Helaine Silverman, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, on ‘Instrumentalities and Realities in Heritage ‘, there will be talks by Mark Harrison and Mike Harlow from English Heritage and St John Simpson from the British Museum.
Further details and the full programme of events is available at: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/heritage-ethics/