Museums and Memory WG Inaugural Online Conference:

“Museums, Memory, Politics”

The Museums and Memory Working Group is proud to announce that it will be hosting its first-ever conference on 24-25 January 2025 as an online conference on Zoom. “Museums, Memory, Politics” will be held online and will feature two days of fruitful discussions about how museums navigate our increasingly politicised present. They aim to critically examine how museums navigate the complexities of memory in contemporary societies, grappling with contested histories, trauma, and reconciliation processes. The conference programme is currently being prepared and will be published in early January. The Zoom links for the concurrent panels will be made available shortly before the conference.

The theme of the 2025 conference, “Museums, Memory, Politics”, offers an opportunity to consider how museums navigate our increasingly politicized present from a position of entanglement within legacies of the past that continue to construct them as unquestioned arbiters of collective memory. Representing historical actors, ideologies, and events in ways that reflect prevailing ideologies and cultural values, museums act as agents of political narrative construction within societies. At the same time, they are spaces of resistance and resilience, making visible marginalized voices and creating communities of support. Yet, calls to reckon with difficult pasts, historical exclusions, and cultural dissonances have situated museums in an ongoing struggle over memory and identity within society.

Over these two days, the WG aim to critically examine how museums navigate the complexities of memory in contemporary societies, grappling with contested histories, trauma, and reconciliation processes. They ask whose stories are privileged, whose voices are marginalized, and how collective memory is negotiated and contested in museums and heritage sites. They also encourage exploration of the ways in which museums engage with pressing socio-political issues, such as territorial disputes and armed conflict, colonial legacies, migration, human rights, and environmental crises. Museums can be sites for addressing contemporary political challenges, but to do so, they must foster dialogue, empathy, and critical reflection among diverse audiences.

Attendance is free, though we do ask that all those interested in joining us register through our Eventbrite page. Our page will be updated with the programme as soon as it is ready. For inquiries, please email museumsandmemoryconference@gmail.com. The conference organising committee is comprised of Trina Cooper-Bolam, Catalina Delgado Rojas, Arleen Ionescu, Maria Kobielska, Stephan Jaeger, Eric Ross, Jill Strauss, and Samantha Vaughn (chair).