ART-idea’s associate, Dr Kris Rampersad, Trinidad and Tobago Representative on the UNESCO Executive Board for the 2013 to 2017 term, will attend the board’s bi-annual meeting at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in April 2014.
Dr Rampersad will address issues of futuring in UNESCO’s operations in the post-2015 global agenda including greater equity of treatment of the Caribbean region in UNESCO’s structure, programme and financial operations, as well as the significance of the Caribbean space in the UNESCO’s Decade for the Rapprochement of Cultures and revisionary approaches to Small Island Developing States in global agenda setting mechanisms.
Trinidad and Tobago was elected to the 58-member board in November 2013. The Board examines and makes recommendations for UNESCO’s programme of work and budgets.
The board also makes recommendations on the admission of new States, makes recommendations on the appointment of the UNESCO Director General; summons extraordinary sessions of the General Conference and international and non-governmental conferences on education, the sciences and humanities or the dissemination of knowledge.
Dr Rampersad, an independent researcher and educator in media and culture and a multimedia producer/writer, has more than two decades experience as an advocate of change and intercultural, interdisciplinary and multisectoral perspectives and approaches to development in the international arena.
She has served as an independent member of the UNESCO International Consultative Body on Intangible Cultural Heritage and has devised and conducted creative interactive courses, seminars and education programmes that encourage critical interrogation of development agendas to stimulate people-centred, gender and culture-sensitive paths to progress. These include evaluations and assessments of north-south relations and particularly the small island developing states of the Caribbean in international policy arena, particularly in relation to gender, governance, culture and education at such forums as Commonwealth and OAS Summits; World Summit of Information Society; World Summit on Arts and Culture, Commonwealth Diversity Conferences, International Conferences on Cultural Policy Research, Brussels Briefings on Agriculture of the ACP-EU, among others. Her successful pilot strategy for such round-table engagements to explore solutions towards food security was adopted as the model for the ACP-EU International Seminar on Media and Agriculture in Brussels.
She has also served as communication strategy and policy at international and national levels including in preparation of the Commonwealth Foundation, and other iNGOs of the Organisation of American States, and Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture.
She is a member of the scientific committee of the International Culture University and chair of the Trinidad and Tobago National Commission for UNESCO.
She is the author of three books that examine the interplay of culture, gender, media and education in development: LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago; Through the Political Glass Ceiling – Race To Prime Ministership by Trinidad and Tobago’s First Female, Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Finding a Place.