Tanzania – Community Culture Tanzania for Sustainable Development
Our ongoing projects in Tanzania have delivered to the government a Digital National Heritage Data Base, trained local communities in heritage recording, evaluated marine heritage resources and trained academic, government and commercial divers in underwater recording and built a community museum at Kilwa Kisiwani. The data base will establish baseline data for the state of preservation for the heritage and provide a means by which the long-term future can be assured for local communities and national heritage management.
Peru – Biocultural heritage and community voice in Amazonia
Textile cultural heritage embodies the social and ecological relations, understandings, skills and beliefs that connect people to place. Despite the significance of textiles for defining and representing indigenous identity in the lowland Amazon, there are few academic sources and most accessible resources, such as the Museum of Indigenous Amazonian Cultures in Iquitos, present this diverse heritage primarily as a collection of objects rather enabling indigenous communities to choose how they are represented or how they wish to use their cultural heritage to interact with the wider world. This project aims to establish how indigenous peoples in lowland Amazonian Peru can use cultural heritage to support resilience, adaptation and autonomy at a time of increased stress – both gradual (e.g. expansion of oil exploitation, growth of markets for non-timber forest products) and abrupt (e.g. oil spills, epidemic, displacement).
Costa Rica – Community Crafts and Cultures (CCC)
Community Crafts and Culture (CCC) is a collaborative community project coordinated by the Museums, Galleries and Collections Institute (MGCI) at the University of St Andrews. Funded by the Scottish Funding Council’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), this project seeks to support and empower three indigenous communities identified by the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica towards a sustainable future, through a collaborative fit-for-purpose practical solution to problems identified by the communities relating their artisan production and promotion.
Ukraine – (Un)archiving (Post)Industry: Engaging Heritage and Developing Cultural Infrastructures
The project aims to continue building the capacities of cultural institutions working with industrial heritage and to foster further cultural innovation in collaboration with local communities in Ukrainian regions heavily impacted by (de-)industrialization. The project will help establish a network, bringing together institutions dealing with industrial cultural heritage sites and practitioners. The network will innovate new ways of sharing collections of photographs, videos, documents and oral histories, as well as facilities and specialized knowledge for collecting, conserving, digitizing, educating, and further reuse of the collections. Lessons learned from use of the shared data will form the basis of input to the Cultural Heritage programme at the University of St Andrews.
Global Conversations
As part of the hub project’s ambitions, we aim to create an innovative platform for the sharing of knowledge and experience between the current sub-projects operating in Tanzania, Peru, Costa Rica and Ukraine as well as previous GCRF funded projects.