Making Living Heritage Visible: Media, Participation & Sustainable Futures

In 2024, the UK ratified the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (or living heritage). But what does this mean in practice? How are different forms of living heritage identified, represented, and sustained? As national and regional inventories begin to take shape, the challenge is not only what counts as living heritage, but how it becomes visible and to whom.

This talk examines how other countries have addressed this challenge, focusing on the role of media in making heritage more visible. In the international arena, living heritage is presented through short audiovisual materials to gain international status and global visibility. These materials do not simply document, but actively shape how heritage is seen and understood: who is shown to participate, how communities are represented, and what becomes recognisable within official frameworks.

The talk connects these global dynamics to emerging initiatives in Wales, including work in Swansea and Neath Port Talbot that brings together community organisations, cultural institutions, and migrant and minority groups through collaborative and creative practices. It reveals how everyday cultural practices—such as community activities, shared skills, and forms of hospitality—might become visible as living heritage, and how they might be recognised within evolving systems of cultural safeguarding, fostering social cohesion, resilience, and sustainable futures in post-industrial settings.

Ultimately, it invites reflection on how heritage systems might move beyond representation toward more inclusive and participatory forms of cultural safeguarding, where visibility is not only granted but collectively shaped.

About the speaker

Dr. Jiyun Zhang (June) is an award-winning animation filmmaker and researcher based at the UNESCO Chair on Critical Heritage Studies and Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage at the University of Antwerp. She works at the intersection of heritage, media, ethnography, and audiovisual arts.

Her research examines how cultural practices are shaped through audiovisual mediation, with a particular focus on the UNESCO 2003 Convention. She has published on participatory animation filmmaking, analysis of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) nomination videos, and the role of digital infrastructures in heritage governance.

Her recent work examines how ICH inventories function as interfaces linking archives, mediation, and policy, with a comparative focus on Europe and Asia.

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