IASTE 2024 - Riyadh: Keynote

Gave a keynote presentation for the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). The 2024 IASTE conference was  titled “The Dynamism of Tradition”. It built on IASTE’s definition of tradition as “a dynamic project for the reinterpretation of the past in light of the present and often in the service of the future.”  IASTE refers to the adaptability and continuity of tradition to evolve as a legitimate manifestation of the socio-cultural and socioeconomic spheres through space and time. IASTE aims to spark a dialogue on the process of understanding how traditions emerge in the current modern world and how they may have changed over a short period of time to deal with the rapid pace of globalization and information technology in the 21st century.  The conference wishes to assess which traditions can or should be sustained or discarded and by whom? By placing tradition under critical examination, and focusing on the vulnerable reality of traditional environments, it is hoped that the conference goes beyond the standard preservation and conservation approaches and dig deeper into how traditions are invented and reinvented, and what traditions represent as part of the dynamic project of creating the future.