The Tibetan Sustainable Heritage Initiative

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In recent decades, the rapid reshaping of the global economy and the emergence of digital technologies have drastically altered the lives of communities around the world, whilst simultaneously threatening the existence of marginalized languages, traditions, and ecosystems. In response to these changes, grassroots activists, scholars, and national and international organizations have sought new ways to "safeguard" and "preserve" languages and traditions. More recently, "cultural sustainability"-based in equity, collaboration, and supporting continued practice and transmission of traditional practices-has shown promise for working collaboratively with communities to find ways to document and revitalize endangered expressive practices. However, while much research has been done with indigenous populations in the democratic West, marginalized communities in authoritarian contexts have largely been overlooked. This tendency to exclude the experience of marginal and indigenous communities in authoritarian contexts risks misrepresenting the nuanced concerns of indigenous communities at a moment of rising authoritarianism around the globe. It also risks misunderstanding how these communities, and how individual cultural brokers are actively working to keep endangered traditions alive in the face of both economic and institutional pressures.Building on my established record researching expressive cultures and developing collaborative cultural programming in Tibetan areas of China, I will lead a diverse team of stakeholders including academics, and grassroots cultural documentarians, to advance scholarship on cultural sustainability through examining how everyday digital technologies can be deployed not merely as a threat to traditions, but also to sustain traditional knowledge. In developing and deploying new applications and content management systems we will create ways for Tibetans to document their own traditions. In then working alongside educators and tradition bearers to co-create methods that use social media and other everyday tools to support the transmission and continued vitality of traditions in Tibetan classrooms. I will use the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for the Tibetan Sustainable Heritage Initiative (TaSHI, the Tibetan word for auspiciousness), to conduct the first such large-scale investigation of cultural sustainability in an authoritarian context.Using cases ranging from both well-supported traditions like the Tibetan Gesar epic-inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity-to endangered practices like a rare genre of extemporaneously composed satirical verse called dakpa, this comparative approach will reshape our understanding of cultural sustainability and broaden our understanding of the Tibetan traditional ecosystem. At the same time, recognizing the factors that make some forms successful is only the first step. TaSHI also creates new digital tools for cultural documentation and works with teachers and community members to document traditions and co-create strategies to encourage further transmission and practice of cultural forms, thereby supporting the continued vitality of the traditional knowledge system more generally. As traditions and languages around the world go silent in the face of social, technological, and political pressures, increasingly affordable and ubiquitous digital technologies are shaping how communities engage with their endangered traditions. TaSHI provides an unprecedented opportunity to develop and test new ways of sustaining traditions in China's Tibetan communities. Findings from minority communities in authoritarian China, in turn, will model new ways to co-create more equitable and sustainable futures for endangered traditions and help to develop theoretical and practical perspectives of cultural sustainability that can be further applied to work with indigenous and marginalized communities within China, and around the globe.