The UNESCO Chair partners up with its French counterpart

In 2025 and 2026 the UNESCO Chair explores paths of cooperation with French colleagues in the intertwined fields of intangible cultural heritage and sustainable development. In September they met in Paris.

The UNESCO Chair on Applied Studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage (University of Tartu) is part of a worldwide network of UNESCO Chairs.

Thanks to a two-year grant from the French-Estonian science and technology cooperation programme PARROT, the Tartu Chair is able to deepen its collaboration with the UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development (CY Cergy Paris Université, France), and its chairholder Chiara Bortolotto.

Focus on inequalities and sustainable development

The cooperation focuses on two topical and tightly interrelated subjects in the framework of intangible cultural heritage – sustainable development and inequalities.

Both UNESCO Chairs also strive for an applied approach, i.e. cooperation with stakeholders like heritage institutions, NGOs and communities. Thus, exchange of good practices in this field is also on the agenda.

Paris: September 2025

In September, the partners met in Paris. In addition to internal working meetings there was time for presentations, academic discussions and networking.

Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, UNESCO Chairholder at the Univesity of Tartu, gave a presentation at a seminar of the Héritages laboratory, which is a research unit supported by the CY Cergy Paris Université, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the French Ministry of Culture.

In her talk “Minorities, ICH and representational belonging: perspectives from Estonia”, she explored the possiblities and challenges of including national minorities into the realm of intangible cultural heritage.

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Aet Annist presented on foraging practices and foragers in Estonia and the UK at a roundtable on “Foraging as living heritage”. The roundtable also featured CNRS researchers working on forest exploitation in France and on local ecological knowledge in the Amazon.

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Also participating in the visit were the Junior Research Fellow Siarhiej Makarevich and the UNESCO Cooperation Specialist Kristiina Porila.

While in Paris, the team also took the opportunity to meet key partners at the UNESCO headquarters – notably Fumiko Ohinata, Secretary of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and Chief of the Living Heritage Entity.

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Finally, a meeting with members of the permanent delegation of the Republic of Estonia to UNESCO took place.