Museums and Memory Working Group 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, 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.

The conference programme will be published on this page in early January. Please check back soon for more information. Zoom links will be sent to all registered attendees shortly before the conference.

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 [email protected].

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

For inquiries, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Museums and Memory Working Group