This conference was cancelled due to uncertainties surrounding COVID-19 at the time.

‘[T]he ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination’ – The Creative Museum Project.

What does creativity look like for Museum Ethnography? While collaboration, particularly with originating communities, is now recognised as vital for bringing new, culturally valuable and previously silenced perspectives to ethnography collections, less has been said about the creative process that underpins collaboration.

The 2020 MEG conference at the World Museum in Liverpool had hoped to consider creativity and museum ethnography from a variety of standpoints:

Museum Ethnography and Creative Practice: what happens when diverse creative practitioners and practices (such as street poets, film makers, theatre stage designers, game designers, comedians, and escape room designers) engage with ethnography collections;

Creativity and Innovation: with dwindling resources how has creative practice solved problems for ethnography collection care, display, digitisation, or consultation and engagement.

Creativity and Museum Audiences: what kinds of collective creativity have resulted from collaborative processes involving museum audiences;

Creativity and Risk: have museums taken creative risks with contested objects, or aspects of professional practices that uphold a colonial mindset;

Creativity and Institutional Memory: what methods enable museums to learn from, share and document the creative process.

The conference invited papers, presentations and creative responses that addressed issues of creativity, collaboration and museum ethnography, particularly welcoming those that included case studies speaking to the following questions:

• Does creativity challenge established processes of displaying, managing and interpreting ethnography and colonial-era collections? If so how?
• Can prototyping, experimenting and sharing the process of production create new audiences for ethnography collections?
• How has the economic downturn both inhibited and encouraged creative practice, and what does this mean for sustaining creative collaborations on a limited budget?
• What happens to acts of creativity after the fact? How do we document processes of creative practice, and more broadly speaking, embed its presence into the memory of the museum?
• How can we make sense of creativity when it does not meet the brief? Is it possible to think creatively about institutional risk, failure and accountability?