About the Chair

  • The Future of Heritage Crime is not what we Expect

    A Romanian fresco showing a saint with a gold halo

    New Heritage Crime Opportunities

    Rapid advances in technology and the complexity of global markets have created new opportunities for heritage crime. We face significant challenges in safeguarding global heritage against emerging crimes that occur at and beyond the boundaries of detection, deterrence, and imagination.
    line of buddhist prayer wheels

    Emerging Heritage Crime

    The UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging Crime, held by criminologist Donna Yates, responds to these challenges by exploring emerging heritage crimes related to contemporary crises whose causes may be known but whose implications are not. 
    A circular stained glass window in a French church

    Forward-facing and Futures-oriented

    The forward-facing Chair develops pathways for understanding heritage crime that we have no existing capacity to predict, detect, or prevent. The Chair’s activities are definitionally futures-oriented, the goal being to address unrealised heritage crime threats before they fully emerge.
    Incense sticks sticking up from 5 bowls in a line in a temple

    Towards Heritage Resilience

    The Chair embraces a proactive (rather than reactive) view of heritage crime to anticipate problems before they occur and to empower the development of responses towards heritage resilience.

  • What is Emerging Heritage Crime?

    The UNESCO Chair in Cultural Heritage and Emerging crime uses an open definition of both “heritage” and “crime”. Exactly what heritage is now is unknown and what it will be in the future is for us to imagine. Crimes can exist in grey space outside of the definitions of the law. 
    New and Emerging Heritage Crime, then, encompasses all threats, challenges, and harms to all forms of cultural heritage that rest beyond the law or beyond our expectations. 
    The Chair is interested in exploring the grey spaces of the present and what they mean for our future.

  • Topics of Immediate Interest to the Chair

    various patterns of kente cloth in Ghana laying in a line so that there is no space between them. Contrasting.
    Under-anticipated heritage crime issues related to knock-on effects of climate change.
    The inner column and arches courtyard of a Spanish Church
    New forms of heritage (e.g. “born digital”, NFTs) and their susceptibility to crime.
    The towers of a Hindu temple in the rain with rich carvings and statues and against a green forested background.
    Uncertainty and heritage crime potential related to leaps in AI and LLMs capacity.