12/03/2025: UNU-MERIT Migration Seminar Series – Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural Heritage in Crises: Connecting Palestinians Beyond Borders and Forced Separation
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 mobilize 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.
About the Speaker:
Bushra Ebadi is a lead research associate at the United Nations University (UNU-EGOV). Her research interests include culture, decolonisation, digital justice and rights, climate justice, intersectional policymaking, global governance, peacebuilding, media and information literacy, social innovation, and systems change. Her main projects at UNU-EGOV include digital access as a human right, climate justice and tech, and initiatives focused on digital rights and justice, concentrating on crises and conflict contexts. As a social innovator, researcher, global strategist, and writer, Bushra mobilizes knowledge, resources, and people to advance justice, peace, human rights, and the agency of systematically marginalised communities around the world. She is also the co-founder of the Health and Information Literacy Access (HILA) Alliance. Before joining UNU-EGOV, Bushra co-led the development and coordination of the Just Tech Movement community, of which she remains a member, with Amnesty International. She has diverse experiences working with United Nations agencies, think tanks, civil society organisations, and community groups, including UNDP, UNICEF, CCUNESCO, and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, supporting various global and regional initiatives related to just futures, tech ethics, refugee and migration governance, infodemic management, pandemic preparedness and response, gender justice, youth engagement, and peacebuilding.Bushra is actively engaged in communities and spaces promoting justice. She currently serves as a board member for Equitas, an international human rights education organisation. Bushra holds a Master of Global Affairs (MGA) from the University of Toronto and a Joint Honours BA in Political Science and Philosophy, with minors in Management and French from McGill University.
To participate, reach out to Soha Youssef – youssef@merit.unu.edu.