Decolonising GLAMs: Practices, Communities and Collective Action (Hybrid)

Decolonising GLAMs: Practices, Communities and Collective Action

This one-day hybrid final conference of the DeCoGLAM community explores how decolonial and community-centred approaches can benefit Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs).

Through talks, discussions, and collaborative mapping, participants will reflect on what it means to decolonise GLAMs practice — and how collective action can build more equitable knowledge futures.

DeCoGLAM (Decolonising the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums Network) brings together researchers, cultural workers, and community organisers to share experience, tools, and critical insights that challenge colonial legacies within memory institutions.

This event will summarise the achievements of DeCoGLAM, discuss its sustainability and continue that conversation by focusing on practice — what we do, how we do it, and how we can act collectively to make change sustainable.

DeCoGLAM is supported by the Collaborative Research Cultures project at the University of Strathclyde funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Info: The Whose Knowledge? team will unpack the struggles of "decolonising" GLAM institutions, reflecting on a set of ongoing, messy but honest practices rather than theory or co-optation.
They will reflect on their own efforts in network building, highlighting the experiences of their own communities and ecosystems of liberatory archiving and memory work.

Info: This session shares experiences and insights from ongoing DeCoGLAM partnerships, examining what effective collaboration looks like across institutions and communities, and what lessons can be carried forward into 2026 and beyond.

Info: Victor Tuon Murari will present the Decolonial Atlas project, focusing on how Wikidata can expose (and sometimes reproduce) global imbalances in digital-art representation. Using SPARQL queries and manual validation, Victor maps practitioners who engage with digital decoloniality, revealing geographic clustering, language asymmetries, and conceptual blind spots.

Info: We will share reflections on 'decolonising' actions, events and achievements of 2025 so far (What), and consider what this can mean in terms of the current situations we work in (So what) - with the ultimate aim of using this as fuel for discussion and deciding our next steps (Now what). Working initially in small groups, everyone will be invited to make step-by-step visual and/or text-based notes in response to prompts, and share these with groupmates as content and context for shared visual action plans. These will then be posted on an online platform - allowing for whole-room engagement, and also serving as a springboard and reference point for continued discussions and collaborations after the session.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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