Beyond Digitisation: Towards Ethical and Sustainable Futures for Digital Heritage Dr. Bijan Rouhani

Beyond Digitisation: Towards Ethical and Sustainable Futures for Digital Heritage
Speaker: Dr. Bijan Rouhani
19 Nov 2025

Digital technologies and AI have transformed how we document, study, manage, and share cultural heritage. They allow us to visualise the past and connect global audiences to sites and collections that were once accessible only to a few. Yet these advances also raise urgent questions about power, ethics, and sustainability. Who controls cultural data, and how can we ensure that digital heritage does not become another form of extraction or exclusion, or deepen the digital divide and perpetuate digital colonialism?

Drawing on examples from the Middle East and North Africa, this lecture explores how to move beyond simple digitisation towards approaches that centre community consent, shared authority, and environmental responsibility. It examines how digital technologies, databases, and AI tools can support—rather than replace—local knowledge and stewardship, and how global standards such as the FAIR and CARE principles can guide more balanced data governance.

Through case studies of collaborative documentation, post-conflict reconstruction, and ethical innovation, the talk argues for a critical and inclusive digital heritage ecosystem—one that widens participation, acknowledges colonial legacies, mitigates technological bias, and safeguards both tangible and intangible heritage for future generations. Ultimately, it calls for digital heritage that not only protects what is at risk but also strengthens the social and ecological contexts that give heritage meaning.

About the speaker:

Bijan Rouhani is a Senior Researcher at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, within the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa (EAMENA) project. His research focuses on the digital documentation of endangered cultural heritage in the contexts of conflict, climate change, and development, as well as the conservation and protection of built heritage, risk management for heritage sites, and post-conflict reconstruction.

Rouhani is Co-Founder of the Endangered Cultural Heritage of the Global South (ECHGS) Hub at Oxford, Chair of the Cultural Emergency Response (CER) Board, and Vice-President of the International Scientific Committee on Risk Preparedness (ICORP) of ICOMOS. He is co-editor of Managing Disaster Risks to Cultural Heritage: From Risk Preparedness to Recovery for Immovable Heritage (Routledge, 2024) and Reporting Heritage Destruction (Archaeopress, 2025). Rouhani has collaborated with international organisations, including the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and ICCROM, on digital heritage as well as on broader issues of cultural heritage protection. He recently organised the Digital Heritage and the Global South conference at Oxford.