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Engaging Cultural Rights in Research,Practice and Policy:Lessons from the Culture and Rightsin Thailand ProjectFeatured Post:by Coeli BarrySenior Advisor, Cultural Rights Forum, Lecturer at the Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, MahidolUniversity. Coeli Barry can be contacted via the Institute at http://www.ihrp.mahidol.ac.th/Cultural institutions around the world today are facing challenges in terms of how theypreserve and disseminate knowledge about cultural heritage. Over the past 20 years, changes ininformation technology and a greater appreciation of the power of representation are promptingpublic institutions to re-assess policies and guidelines about who should have access to existingholdings and how new information should be gathered and made available to the public. Institutionsincreasingly find themselves facing decisions about the ethics of making digitized material morewidely available to source communities, as well as about how anthropological materials shouldbe collected and displayed.In some cases, cultural institutions, such asmuseums, libraries, archives and research centers,have developed restricted access protocols and digitalrepatriation policies in response to the demands ofcommunities to either return items or facilitate greatercommunity access. Even if cultural institutions are notdirectly challenged by community claims, they may still takepart in the widespread and lively debate in professionalgatherings, scholarly outlets and on the internet aboutthe most suitable institutional policies that can takeaccount of the interests of the ‘culture bearers’ alongsidethose of the public more widely. In fields as diverse asmuseum studies, archaeology, knowledge management,heritage studies, visual arts, and anthropology, there isan increasing awareness of the potential for innovationin how anthropological knowledge is gathered, used anddisplayed.One framework that is emerging as particularlysalient for practitioners and scholars alike is a rightsbasedapproach to heritage management. This approachdraws on international human rights conventions thatpromote the notion of ‘a right to culture’ in a general sense,as well as those documents that address cultural rightsfor minorities, or the rights of communities to participatein managing their heritage in more particular cases. Theright to culture and the right to “belong to” a culture hasbecome an increasingly important topic in contemporaryacademic debates, and this concept has found expressionin international human rights instruments, including the2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Nationalgovernments may not uniformly or enthusiastically endorsethese international rights documents, even when theysign them. Nonetheless, practitioners, scholars, rightsadvocates and community leaders reference them anddraw on rights norms in their own work.In 2009, researchers at the Princess Maha ChakriSirindhorn Anthropology Centre (SAC) proposed toundertake a project on Culture and Rights in Thailand(CRT) with the goal of understanding how these issueswere being negotiated in the context of Thailand. Theconcept of cultural rights and the right to culture isrelatively new in Thailand, and the CRT sought to identifyif there were local, vernacular equivalents to the Western,international discourse of cultural rights. Thailand’s