IAFOR > The IAFOR Conference on Heritage – Hong Kong (Heritage-HongKong) > Heritage–HongKong > Programme

Programme

Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. This page provides details of presentations and other programming. For more information about presenters, please visit the Speakers page.

  • Documentary Strategies for Chinese Martial Arts as Living Heritage in Hong Kong: Perspectives from the Field
    Documentary Strategies for Chinese Martial Arts as Living Heritage in Hong Kong: Perspectives from the Field
    Keynote Presentation: Hing Chao
  • Traveling Exchanges: Theatres, Architectures, and Heritage
    Traveling Exchanges: Theatres, Architectures, and Heritage
    Keynote Presentation: Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren
  • Escape from Heritage
    Escape from Heritage
    Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall
  • IAFOR Silk Road Initiative Information Session
    IAFOR Silk Road Initiative Information Session
Documentary Strategies for Chinese Martial Arts as Living Heritage in Hong Kong: Perspectives from the Field
Keynote Presentation: Hing Chao

Chinese martial arts are a symbol for Chinese culture around the world and increasingly recognised as a form of intangible cultural heritage in Mainland China, Hong Kong and internationally. Yet this has not always been the case. Drawing upon the author’s first-hand experience as a leading researcher and advocate for Chinese martial arts in Hong Kong over the past decade, this paper begins with a short discussion on the history of Chinese martial arts in Hong Kong, how their role and public perception evolved over time, and the difficulties and challenges in preserving Chinese martial arts as a “living heritage” today.

Using Hakka martial arts as a case study, the author then discusses the process by which traditional martial arts are (re-)defined in light of current academic research, and the research methodologies therein. As a self-reflexive exercise, this discussion sheds critical light on the politics of “intangible cultural heritage” in Hong Kong, as well as the limitations and “constructedness” of the concept of “intangible cultural heritage” as defined by UNESCO. The concluding section details the research and documentary strategies for traditional martial arts in Hong Kong.

Read presenter biographies.

Traveling Exchanges: Theatres, Architectures, and Heritage
Keynote Presentation: Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren

This presentation, growing out of a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Research Award as well as ongoing work in India and Hong Kong over the past 9 years, will focus on evolving models of performing heritage in South India related to patterns of cultural exchanges, labor, and migration across rapidly changing urban landscapes. Performance forms such as daveli, kalaripayattu, and kuttiyattam in Kerala and of theru koothu and silambattam in Tamil Nadu—as well as living history and interactive museums—act as social indices for evaluating a range of performing heritages. These performances, which travel across a variety of venues from temples, kalaris, homes, stages, museums, and related institutions, require communities of performers, cultural producers, curators, and researchers to form mutually reciprocal, and at times new, identities across the various cultural sites. These “traveling exchanges” then, in turn, lead to new forms of the performances. This work opens up to a critical spatial analysis that accounts for how the architectural and community sites of exchange operate within the South Indian context as well as to implications for re-thinking spatial practices of heritage in a transnational context. Amplified through the arts and new media practices, these Traveling Exchanges can help make heritage industries more economically viable, culturally visible, and socially empowering at the local and regional as well as international levels. In the second part of the presentation, we will discuss ideas for furthering more viable contexts for performing cultural heritages.

Read presenter biographies.

Image | Kalaripayattu performance in Kerala (Pixabay)

Escape from Heritage
Keynote Presentation: Donald E. Hall

In this talk, Donald E. Hall of the University of Rochester (New York) will discuss the city of his birth: Birmingham, Alabama (USA) and the legacy of racism and intolerance embodied in that southern American city.. While much of this conference will examine heritage as a potential wellspring of personal sustenance and cultural enrichment, many of us have also encountered aspects of heritage that make us deeply uncomfortable and that over time prove unsustainable. The heritage of a city, region, or nation can come to feel like a trap if its values and priorities are not compatible with the identities, beliefs, and needs of marginalized members of its citizenry. After discussing his personal journey out of a context of racial intolerance and religious conservatism, Professor Hall will pose questions to the audience for all to consider: What do we need from heritage? How and why do places become calcified by heritage and prove unable to embrace the changing needs of a diverse population? How do we gain a critical distance on the context in which we are born and what opportunities are there for self reinvention through flight? After speaking for 30 minutes Professor Hall will ask the audience to provide their own thoughts on heritage as a source of both pleasure and pain.

Read presenter biographies.

IAFOR Silk Road Initiative Information Session

As an organization, IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, facilitate intercultural awareness, encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and generate and share new knowledge. In 2018, we are excited to launch a major new and ambitious international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research initiative which uses the silk road trade routes as a lens through which to study some of the world’s largest historical and contemporary geopolitical trends, shifts and exchanges.

IAFOR is headquartered in Japan, and the 2018 inauguration of this project aligns with the 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan opened its doors to the trade and ideas that would precipitate its rapid modernisation and its emergence as a global power. At a time when global trends can seem unpredictable, and futures fearful, the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative gives the opportunity to revisit the question of the impact of international relations from a long-term perspective.

This ambitious initiative will encourage individuals and institutions working across the world to support and undertake research centring on the contact between countries and regions in Europe and Asia – from Gibraltar to Japan – and the maritime routes that went beyond, into the South-East Continent and the Philippines, and later out into the Pacific Islands and the United States. The IAFOR Silk Road Initiative will be concerned with all aspects of this contact, and will examine both material and intellectual traces, as well as consequences.

For more information about the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative, click here.