DB3: Living Underwater Heritage, the Natural within Cultural, and Advocacy
Tracks
3
| Tuesday, December 1, 2026 |
| 10:45 AM - 12:45 PM |
| RHMZ03 |
Paper / Session Submitter
Professor Lucas Lixinski
Professor + Associate Dean (international))
UNSW Sydney
Living Underwater Heritage, the Natural within Cultural, and Advocacy
Summary Abstract
We usually think of underwater cultural heritage (UCH) in the same terms that UNESCO defines it: as remains of human activity that have been underwater for at least 100 years, and are not in current use by humans. Many heritage professionals and scholars are then stuck in this imaginary of UCH as being only abandoned vessels and their cargo.
In this roundtable, we bring together many disciplines and lived experiences of UCH, which upset UNESCO’s authorized imaginary of this heritage domain. We wish to use this roundtable to think with the ACHS community about better ways of imagining, conserving, and regulating UCH. We also wish to query whether and how a reinvented UCH can serve as a better pathway for advocacy in domains like deep seabed mining, and other forms of resource exploitation that have a deep impact on living cultures and ways of being and knowing the universe.
In this roundtable, we bring together many disciplines and lived experiences of UCH, which upset UNESCO’s authorized imaginary of this heritage domain. We wish to use this roundtable to think with the ACHS community about better ways of imagining, conserving, and regulating UCH. We also wish to query whether and how a reinvented UCH can serve as a better pathway for advocacy in domains like deep seabed mining, and other forms of resource exploitation that have a deep impact on living cultures and ways of being and knowing the universe.
Biographies
Lucas Lixinski is Professor and Associate Dean (International) at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. He sits on the editorial board of the International Journal of Heritage Studies, and is a former Vice President (Conference) of the ACHS. His latest monograph is A Research Agenda for Cultural Heritage Law.
Matteo Collina is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Victoria University of Wellington, where he works on the intersection between natural and cultural heritage in Fojrdland National Park, also a World Heritage Site.
Susanne Rawson is a Director for HPFS Solutions and specialises in object conservation. Her specialty is working with sites and objects in coastal environments, although she has been fortunate to work with a variety of materials and artworks and in locations from the Arctic to the Antarctic and across the Near East and Africa.
Karen Greig is a Pacific archaeologist with a research interest in the colonisation of Oceania and the emergence of distinct Pacific cultures. She is particularly interested in how human-animal relationships have influenced the development of Pacific societies. Her research approach is based on archaeological and anthropological theories and methods, combined with ancient DNA and other biomolecular approaches.
