The 2026 MEG Conference and Annual General Meeting took place at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on the 23rd and 24th of April 2026. Hosted by the Rethinking Relationships project, this conference offered space to reflect on what equitable collaboration looks like in practice, and on what collaboration is able to do or undo.

Programme Highlights

• Two days of papers, workshops, tours, films and networking across the Pitt Rivers Museum site. Workshops required sign-up on the day at the registration desk, on a first come, first served basis, with limited spaces (approximately 7 to 25 participants unless otherwise stated).
• Day 1 (Thursday 23 April) opened with a welcome from Professor Christopher Morton (Acting Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum) and Beth McDougall (Families and Communities Officer, Pitt Rivers Museum), followed by Paper Session 1, “Representation and Exhibition: Reframing Museum Narratives”.
• Day 1 workshops and activities included “Relational Objects: Mapping Emotional Response to Museum Artefacts”, “Re-Archiving Resistance: A Participatory Workshop on Lovedale Press and Visual Counter-Narratives” and “Coding and Decoding Gods”. There was also a programme of short films from the Restitution Study Group and the Benin Kingdom Museum Initiative, a behind-the-scenes tour of the Collections Teaching and Research Centre (CTRC), and a networking space.
• The Annual General Meeting took place on Day 1 from 14:00 to 15:00 (MEG members only), followed by Paper Session 2, “Working Together? Collaboration, Power and Institutional Constraints”.
• Day 1 concluded with a free public evening event, “African Community Connections: A Celebration” (6pm to 9pm), with a DJ, bar, participatory object handling, a basket weaving workshop with African Families in the UK, a performance and workshop from Bantu Arts, and spotlight sessions from community partners, artists and researchers. Booking was required.
• Day 2 (Friday 24 April) began with Paper Session 3, “Access, Authority and Responsibility in Museum Collections”, followed by workshops and activities: “Performance as Enquiry”, “Creative Health Lab: Reframing Collections”, “London Indra Jatra Workshop” and “From Hosting to Allyship: Embedding Ceremony and Protocol in Ethnographic Museums”. Tours of the CTRC and Multaka Oxford’s “With these Hands: Crafting a Shared Humanity” display were also offered.
• Day 2 continued with Paper Session 4, “Care, Relationships and the Ethics of Engagement”, and closed with “Burning Questions”, an open group discussion led by Beth McDougall.
• Lunch was provided on both days at the Life and Mind Building, University of Oxford.

The full conference programme, including session details and speaker names, can be viewed here (PDF).

About Rethinking Relationships

Rethinking Relationships is an Arts Council England funded project running from September 2024 to December 2026. It works across five African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana) and four UK museums: the Horniman Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and the World Museum in Liverpool. MEG is a partner in the project and will share the results of its research through these museums.

Call for Papers

This year’s theme, “Equitable Collaboration: What Is Collaboration Able to Do or Undo?”, invited critical engagement with the practical and political realities of collaborative museum work. Sessions explored questions such as:

Representation and exhibition: How are exhibitions and curatorial practices being rethought through collaborative approaches?

Power and institutional constraints: How do funding structures, institutional hierarchies and uneven power relations shape partnerships?

Access, authority and responsibility: How do institutions negotiate competing claims over objects, histories and knowledge?

Care and the ethics of engagement: How can the emotional labour and relationship-building behind collaboration be recognised within institutions?

Speakers explored these questions through case studies, research and reflections from a wide range of contexts. In addition to traditional papers, the 2026 conference placed particular emphasis on participatory workshops, film, tours and public events.

Conference Bursaries

MEG awarded two bursaries to support conference participants. We were pleased to support the attendance of:

• Olly DeHerrera (University of Oxford), presenting ‘An Arrowhead Can Leave Anytime It Wants’: Indigenous Strategies for Object Collaborations
• Abigail Egwunyenga, who received support for attendance.

Both recipients were invited to contribute reflections on their experiences, which have been shared on the MEG blog. You can access the blogs using the following links:

• The 16th MEG conference: Decolonial initiatives and changing the narrative by Abigail Egwunyenga
• Re-thinking Relationships: Reflections on MEG Annual Conference 2026 by Olly DeHerrera