Janet Blake is the Director of an NGO accredited to UNESCO’s 2003 ICH Convention and has acted as an independent expert for UNESCO on the treaty’s development and implementation since 1999. As a Professor of Environmental and Human Rights Law at Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran) from 2001 to 2024, she cooperated closely with the Tehran ICH Centre (Category 2 Centre for UNESCO) from 2012 to 2024 and has served on cultural heritage law Committees of the International Law Association since 2012. Her publications include International Cultural Heritage Law (2015) and UNESCO’s 2003 Intangible Heritage Convention – A Commentary (2020) published by Oxford University Press and Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Practical Interpretation of the 2003 UNESCO Convention published by Edward Elgar in 2023.
Chris Ballard is Associate Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra. He has conducted long term field research over the past 40 years as an archaeologist, historian and anthropologist, principally in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and eastern Indonesia. His recent work has focused on cultural heritage and World Heritage, indigenous historicity and colonial history, climate change and natural disasters, resource ownership and land rights, and colonial encounters and concepts of race. He was lead researcher for Vanuatu's first UNESCO World Heritage site, Chief Roi Mata's Domain (inscribed in 2008), and continues to work closely with UNESCO's Living Heritage Entity on the relationship between intangible cultural heritage and emergencies since 2016, and on living heritage and climate action since 2022. He has been Editor of the Journal of Pacific History and his publication include books or edited special issues on disasters (Naturalising Disasters in the Pacific, 2019), anthropology (Fluid Ontologies, 1998; Myth and History in the New Guinea Highlands, 1999), agriculture (Agricultural Intensification in New Guinea, 2001; The Sweet Potato in Oceania, 2005), archaeology (Perspectives on the Past in the New Guinea Highlands, 2003), and history (Historical Perspectives on West New Guinea, 1999; Race to the Snow, 2001, Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the science of race, 1750-1940, 2008; Film and History in the Pacific, 2010; Race, Place, Encounters and Governance in Oceania 2012, Rough Justice: punitive expeditions in Oceania, 2017; Material Encounters, 2020).
Yoko Nojima is the Head of Research Section of the International Research Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (IRCI), a category 2 centre under the auspices of UNESCO, based in Japan. After receiving PhD in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2008, she worked extensively in the Pacific and Southeast Asia as an archaeologist and cultural heritage researcher. Her research outcomes include Pottery as cooking vessels: the persistence of pottery technology in the western coast of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu (2010); Non-ceramic grave goods of Phum Snay in the context of sociopolitical development in northwest Cambodia (2013); and Ceremonial landscape in Island Melanesia: the gamal complex of the Banks Islands, Northern Vanuatu (2024). Her engagement with the field of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) began in 2014, when she joined IRCI as an Associate Fellow and worked on various projects. She has been leading research projects for safeguarding ICH, addressing sustainability and resilience as shown in recent publications such as Natural Hazards and the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage: experiences from the Asia-Pacific Region (2024); Case Studies on Intangible Cultural Heritage amid COVID-19 Pandemic in the Asia-Pacific Region (2024); and Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Communities in the Asia-Pacific Region (2025).
Momoyo Shibuya is a Researcher at the International Research Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (IRCI), where she engages in research and project coordination related to the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage in the region. Before joining IRCI, she served as Professor at Okinawa University and previously as Associate Professor at Saitama University in Japan. She received her PhD from Macquarie University in Australia, where she studied ethnic relations within Japanese transnational communities. Her research focuses on soft power, foodways in urban migrant communities, and collective memory as cultural heritage. Her recent works include the co-edited volume Urban Risk and Well-Being in Asian Megacities (Routledge, 2023) and a chapter on Japanese war museums in The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (2nd ed.).
