Migration Seminar Series: Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural Heritage in Crises: Connecting Palestinians Beyond Borders and Forced Separation

Migration Seminar: Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural Heritage in Crises – Bushra Ebadi explores how digital tools both protect and endanger Palestinian heritage amid conflict, displacement, and governance challenges.

In early 2024, a team of UNU-EGOV researchers set out to co-design and develop a collaborative initiative, Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural Heritage in Crises, with partners to mobilise knowledge, resources, and relevant stakeholders across generations, geographies, and sectors to:

• deepen our understanding of the ways digital technologies support and undermine cultural heritage in crises
• inform and shape the development and design of meaningful policies and governance mechanisms
• support capacity building and training of artists, cultural practitioners, policymakers, and advocates
• facilitate knowledge sharing, including best practices and methods, across different crises contexts

Palestinian heritage has been under threat due to conflict and violence since the 1920s. Heritage in Gaza is under attack and threatened by mass atrocities, including acts of cultural cleansing and genocide. The destruction of heritage sites, archives, and institutions has accelerated since October 2023, presenting a dire situation that risks the wholesale destruction of the memory and heritage of Palestine and the world. The forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, including descendants of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba, threatens the preservation and safeguarding of ancestral heritage.

Digital technologies, including advanced digital tools such as extended reality, autonomous drones, and AI, are both supporting and undermining cultural heritage. The absence of meaningful and comprehensive digital governance mechanisms pose specific threats and challenges to the culture sector as a whole, as well as artists, cultural practitioners, and heritage (tangible and intangible), especially in crises contexts. Culture can be conceptualized as a technology, and leveraged as a tool for social transformation, community development and wellbeing, collective action, and the exercising of our individual and collective rights and agency.

This presentation will provide an overview of the Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural Heritage in Crises initiative and share early research findings on the ways digital technologies are being used to both protect and undermine Palestinian cultural heritage, both in occupied Palestine and among diaspora. The seminar will take place on Zoom, please click on this link to join. You can find the previous Migration Seminars in this YouTube playlist. For further information, please contact Soha Youssef (convenor of the Migration Seminar series, on behalf of UNU-MERIT & MACIMIDE): youssef@merit.unu.edu.