CONFERENCE ON DIVERSITIES AND GENDERS

The conference will address how World Heritage is being contextualized in relation to Gender & Diversities and the SDGs. How can research, frameworks and working tools either theoretically or on site address marginalisation and valuation within this sector? The aim of the conference is to address various mechanisms that exclude diversity at World Heritage sites. They include: structural inequalities within World Heritage discourses that marginalise communities; domination of the majority culture over heritage policies; multiple and shifting forms of identities that can better represent official narratives on World Heritage; actions taken by stakeholders that either collectively or deliberately marginalise communities. The conference will also explore innovative ways to address issues affecting gender and diversities at World Heritage particularly relating to SDGs.

SESSION I – OPPRESSION FROM MONUMENTS

This session looks at how marginalised groups are affected by the constant reminder of what historical monuments represent. The power of how their struggles came about, glorified in a monument.

How the proclaimation of a host country’s dominance over another is celebrated in broad spectacle? The version of history that celebrates, gives prominence and authority over another placed in public arenas. This constant colonial oppression and reminder that the other that was conquered is still insignificant, creates a mental instability for the oppressed gazing at the monuments in question. Marginalised communities see these monuments as part of a streetscape as they go about their businesses, these structures are still part of their periphery vision. They still have to experience a public space that they can’t fully identify with because of the representation of a historical monument in that same space.

In this panel we explore the mental health issues associated with oppressions from the constant reminder of a past steeped in enslavement, degradation, torture and disempowerment. How marginalised communities affected by what colonial monuments represent mean for their mental well being.

Session Moderator:
Frida Larios (El Salvador, Gatherer, (International) Indigenous Design Circle)

SPEAKERS

Shadreck Chirikure (Professor of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, South Africa & University of Oxford, United Kingdom)

Michelle Codrington-Rogers (National President, NASUWT- Teachers’ Union, UK)

Petrona Xemiyulu Tapepechul de Bull Shields (Nawat Nation of Kuskatan, Playwright)

La Vaughn Belle (Visual Artist, Virgin Islands)

Ruth Fallenbaum (Clinical Psychologist, California)

Syrus Ware (Visual Artist, Curator, Activist, Black Lives Matter – Toronto, Performance Disability Art Collective, McMaster University)

Visual Heritage Storyboards from around the Globe: Ms. Fernande Bodo