Call for Papers: Museums, Memory, Politics

The Memory Studies Association’s Museums and Memory Working Group welcomes proposals for its first-ever conference, to be held virtually on 24 and 25 January 2025.

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, we aim to critically examine how museums navigate the complexities of memory in contemporary societies, grappling with contested histories, trauma, and reconciliation processes. We ask whose stories are privileged, whose voices are marginalized, and how collective memory is negotiated and contested in museums and heritage sites. We 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.

In pursuit of these themes, we welcome submissions related to topics such as:

● Restitution and repatriation

● Challenges to established memory/counter-memories

● Political uses and abuses of memory and trauma in museums and heritage sites

● The commemoration and politicisation of conflicts in museums

● Museum responses to past and current conflict

● Museums as potential sites of activism

● Challenges of museums as potential mediators of knowledge and facilitators of social dialogue

● Trauma, conflict, and reconciliation

● Displaying, exhibiting, curating memory

● Migration and decolonization in museums

● Digitization of memory

● Museum politics and exhibiting techniques in the 21st century

Dates to remember

● Proposal submission deadline: 16 September 2024

● Decision date: early November 2024

● Conference on 24-25 January 2025 (Friday and Saturday)

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words and should be submitted via https://forms.gle/n1NoZnWcMb4NfjJb9. We welcome a range of formats. These include but are not limited to: individual papers (15-minutes in length), roundtables, and workshops. Additional formats are encouraged; please reach out to the organizing committee to discuss these.

There is no conference fee, but presenters must be active MSA members by 8 January 2025 to be on the final conference program.

The Museums and Memory working group is part of the Memory Studies Association. Our goal is to bring together academics, curators, archivists, technologists, activists, and other stakeholders interested in the intersection of museums and memory. To join the working group, please email museumsandmemory@gmail.com.

Conference organizing committee: Trina Cooper-Bolam, Catalina Delgado Rojas; Arleen Ionescu; Maria Kobielska, Stephan Jaeger, Doreen Pastor; Eric Ross; Jill Strauss; Samantha Vaughn.

For inquiries, please email museumsandmemoryconference@gmail.com.