A UNBC Associate Professor is the new United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Co-Chair in Living Heritage and Sustainable Livelihoods.
“The idea of the UNESCO Chair has all these different subjects that are seen to be priorities of some of the UNESCO programming, as they relate to education, sustainability, and of course cultural transmission,” said Agnieszka Pawlowska-Mainville, Associate Professor of Global and International Studies.
“This UNESCO Chair focuses on this idea of living heritage or intangible cultural heritage, which a very vague, intentionally vague, and very broad element devoted to protecting and creating avenues for promoting cultural heritage elements, and of course for safeguarding these cultural heritage elements so they can be passed on to future generations.”
Pawlowska-Mainville will be the Co-Chair with Heritage Saskatchewan’s Director of Living Heritage, Kristin Catherwood.
Pawlowska-Mainville has been doing similar work for the past 20 years.
She added she’s looking forward to working with other UNESCO Chairs.
“This is especially important for this discipline or this kind of work is because Canada doesn’t have an official policy at the federal level on living heritage or intangible cultural heritage because Canada is not one of the countries that has signed onto the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage,” Pawlowska-Mainville explained.
She says this puts UNBC at the nexus of research in living heritage, sustainable economic pathways, language transmission, and heritage-sourced livelihoods.
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