Tai Kwun Conversations: UNESCO Series - Talk 3
Heritage, power and gender in cities

Sealing Cheng teaches at the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before that, she was Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College in the US. Her research is focused on sexuality with reference to sex work, human trafficking, women’s activism, and policy-making. Her book, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press 2010) received the Distinguished Book Award of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association in 2012.

Roslyn Russell is a historian and museum consultant based in Canberra, Australia. She has been involved with the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme since 1994 as part of the team that developed the first version of the General Guidelines for Safeguarding Documentary Heritage (UNESCO, Paris, 1995). She was a foundation member of the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Committee in 2000 and has been its Chair since 2013. She completed her doctorate in English Literature from the University of New South Wales and holds a BA (Hons) and MA (Hons) in History from the University of Sydney.

Chantal Wong is the co-founder of three charities in Hong Kong: Learning Together, empowering refugee and asylum seeker youth to take on leadership through access to education, scholarships, and leadership training; Women’s Festival, a platform promoting gender awareness and equality through public discourse; and Things That Can Happen (2014-2017), an art space that explored the role of art in society. She is a Ford Global Fellow, a global community working to combat inequality brought together by the Ford Foundation. Until recently she was the Director of Culture at Eaton in Hong Kong, a purpose-driven hospitality brand where she led a culture and programming team to transform the property into a champion for creativity, artistic experimentation and safe-space for intersectional and marginal communities. Prior to this she worked with Asia Art Archive, a research centre and archive of modern and contemporary art from Asia as head of strategy helping to build up an invaluable resource for the (re)writing of histories with post-colonial perspectives from the region.

Gerard Lico is a Professor and Director of the Research Office at the College of Architecture, University of the Philippines Diliman. He practices architecture as a heritage conservation professional and designer of institutional buildings. He is a prolific author of publications on Filipino architecture and cultural studies, curator of architectural exhibitions, and director of documentaries on Philippine architecture.

He has been involved in the conservation of landmarks such as the Manila Metropolitan Theater, the Rizal Memorial Coliseum, and the core buildings of the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman. He also served as a consultant of conservation planning initiatives for other local and national heritage sites across the country. Apart from presently serving as Consulting Architect for the City of Valenzuela, he heads a multi-disciplinary, research-oriented design consultancy practice.