In the ornate halls of Schloss Leopoldskron — where lake mist meets baroque grandeur, and The Sound of Music once framed cinematic history — conversations turned this year to something far less nostalgic and far more urgent: the future of culture itself.
It was here, at Salzburg Global’s 2026 session Creating Futures: Rethinking Cultural Infrastructure, Investment, that Trinidad and Tobago’s Dr Kris Rampersad found herself among a global circle of thinkers reimagining culture not as ornament, but as infrastructure — something as essential to society as roads, schools or energy systems.
Within that setting of layered history and international exchange, she was inducted into the distinguished Salzburg Global network of Fellows and changemakers.
She has been inducted into the distinguished network of Salzburg Global, joining its international canon of Fellows and changemakers. In this historic space, conversations turned toward a pressing contemporary question: how should societies fund, value and design culture in a rapidly shifting digital and geopolitical world?
Founded in 1947 in the aftermath of war, Salzburg Global has evolved into one of the world’s most influential transatlantic convening platforms — a space where ideas meet policy, and where Nobel laureates, heads of state and global thinkers have shaped post-war systems of governance, culture and diplomacy.
For Dr Rampersad, the fellowship was both recognition and responsibility.
“From the land of oil and music, joining the Salzburg Global canon as a Fellow was an opportunity to push beyond rhetoric and posturing. It allowed us to advance the repositioning of culture, not as peripheral and ornamental, but as foundational to economic prosperity, innovation, diversification, social cohesion, and global peace and security. It also placed Caribbean, SIDS and priorities of the Global South centre stage of the global action agenda for change,” said Dr Rampersad, who is an independent scholar, award-winning journalist and author, Woman Techmakers’ Ambassador, UNESCO Heritage Facilitator, and National Geographic Educator.
“I was not simply representing Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean or Global South. I took perspectives of communities too often excluded from the rooms where futures are designed. The Caribbean has never lacked intelligence, imagination or innovation. What we have lacked are systems willing to value them with the same seriousness given to extraction, finance and trade.”
Across Salzburg’s intensive exchanges, participants interrogated the architecture of cultural systems — from funding models and institutional frameworks to questions of access, equity and technological disruption. Dr Rampersad’s contribution extended this inquiry into the lived realities of the Caribbean, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and the Global South, where culture is often abundant but structurally undervalued.
Her reflections are also feeding into a larger body of work — a multimedia exploration titled EPIC Landscapes of World Heritage and History — which threads Salzburg’s ideas through wider global journeys and narratives.
At the centre of her Salzburg engagement was a consistent theme: the need to reframe knowledge itself.
Dr Rampersad brought to the table decades of experience in international development, intercultural relations, gender equity, education reform and media innovation, with a focus on elevating marginalised knowledge systems from the Caribbean and beyond.
She also introduced perspectives on ethical artificial intelligence and digital futures, challenging dominant narratives of data neutrality and technological progress.
“Multiculturalism is not a mode to be managed; diversity is not an add-on. It is the operating system of intelligence, and just as we are retuning humans from traditional monocultural mindsets to appreciate that, we must retune AI to avoid those misconceptions,” she said.
One of her key contributions was co-leading a creative session titled Connected Cultural Ecosystems and Shared Intelligence, where ideas moved fluidly between policy, imagination and systems design.
“We envisioned a pathway to a ‘Culture-Centred Creative Cosmos,’ interconnecting human and non-human intelligence, including AI to secure creative futures for marginalized, suppressed, and disappearing communities. It inspired other participants to develop a roadmap, circumventing key real-world roadblocks, external and internal shocks and disruptions as financing, taxation, censorship, war, and shortsighted planning.
“This ‘Cosmos’ combined Steiner’s and my experiences in working with communities and fed from the imperative that inspired the GloCal Knowledge Pot. Recognised by a national Lumination innovation award, GKP was created to synergise and bridge gaps, silos and fragmentation in our knowledge systems across separate disciplines of media, culture, gender, education and others to coalesce into a multidisciplinary portal that represents such an interconnection.
“Here, culture moves from being a sector to pivot understanding through new blended plural multidisciplinary models that drive governance, policy, technology, heritage, education and creative industries and revise broader economic and social planning.
“We are often viewed through the lens of vulnerability. But vulnerability also breeds innovation, resilience, improvisation and forms of knowledge the world urgently needs,” said Dr Rampersad.
“Just as in our 30-plus year lobby to recognise culture as a pivot, not a ‘sector’ of development, the world is now awakening to the imperative of such visioning.”
A second strand of her Salzburg contribution focused on the idea of “Culture as Civic Infrastructure” — a framing that challenges how societies measure value, allocate investment and define development itself.
“What became clearer was that so many, even those from the North-centric European and American spheres, shared frustrations in the Global South with limitations of mindsets of investors, financiers, and decision makers, including for-profit models that inhibit experimentation and innovation, and realising the potential of culture and creativity for innovation and transformation,” she reflected.
“Culture is not peripheral to governance. Culture is governance. It shapes how societies imagine justice, belonging, memory, economy, identity and the future itself. Therefore, it should drive the planning and projects across all sectors.
“And that moves beyond the for-profit models and models of ‘impact investing’, and even current ESG models, for an arena in which impact assessment is grossly underassessed and undervalued, and the roles of investors, financiers, public and corporate sector decision making need to be radically revised.”
Beyond dialogue, Dr Rampersad also contributed tangible intellectual artefacts to Salzburg Global’s Max Reinhardt Library — including LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction, Through the Political Glass Ceiling, and Sopari Mai, a UNESCO-informed exploration of intangible cultural heritage and multi-faith social cohesion. She also presented a newly written poem, From The Land Petro-Cursed, accompanied by a multimedia montage linking Caribbean industrial experience with European industrial history.
Her broader global portfolio includes initiatives that have shaped policy and programming across UNESCO, the Commonwealth, the European Union and Inter-American institutions — particularly in gender equity, agriculture, education reform and cultural development.
Among her innovations are CEIBA EDUtainment, which fuses indigenous knowledge systems with digital tools; AuthenTHINK Intel; and AI AnalyEthics — frameworks designed to interrogate bias, strengthen transparency and ensure accountability in emerging AI systems.
Her multimedia EPIC project — a continuation of LiTTscapes — reimagines epic storytelling through sound, migration routes, ancestral memory and digital media across the Global South, Latin America and India. It is being developed further through the MultiMedia MicroEpic format, blending classical narrative traditions with contemporary digital expression.
Looking ahead, Dr Rampersad is expanding the GloCal Knowledge Pot into a global-to-local innovation ecosystem, designed as a multidisciplinary incubator for knowledge, culture and technology integration across the Global South.
At its core sits a conviction that emerged repeatedly in Salzburg’s discussions: that culture is not a sector to be managed, but a system that shapes everything.
“From the shared experiences across the globe by practitioners on the theme Creating Cultures: Rethinking Cultural Institutions, Investment and Infrastructure, the notion of the GloCal Knowledge Pot as an integrated global-to-local intelligence ecosystem is clearly an idea whose time has come.”
