The 2025 MEG Conference and Annual General Meeting took place at the Museum of Liverpool on the 24th and 25th of April 2025. Hosted by the National Museums Liverpool’s Global Cultures team, this special conference marked MEG’s 50th anniversary, offering space to reflect on five decades of museum ethnography, community engagement, and institutional change.

Programme Highlights

• Pre-conference tours of the World Cultures Gallery at the World Museum were held on 23 April, offering informal opportunities for early arrivals to connect with curators and each other.
• Over two packed days of presentations, panel discussions, and conversations, the conference explored the theme of “help” in, by, and for museums—reflecting on institutional responsibility, solidarity, and support in challenging times.
• Day 1 concluded with a drinks reception in the People’s Republic gallery, celebrating MEG’s milestone anniversary, complete with cake cutting.
• An optional conference dinner was held at Maray, Albert Dock.
• The Annual General Meeting took place on Day 2.

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

Online Panel Event

Is Help Really Helping? Colonial Legacies of Power Dynamics in the Museum. 8 May 2025 | 13:00–14:00 BST | Online

Due to technical difficulties, one of the originally scheduled panels could not be accommodated during the in-person conference. We were delighted to offer this important conversation as a standalone online event shortly afterwards.

Museums often position their outreach to marginalised communities as benevolent gestures of inclusion. But when institutions rooted in colonial legacies ask for “help” from those they historically subordinated, how does this request embody colonial power dynamics?

This powerful panel interrogated the ethics and ontology of “help” within museum spaces—asking when it becomes extractive, and when it can be transformed into meaningful solidarity. The discussion centred on the Surinamese kappa (sugar cauldron) at the Rijksmuseum as a starting point to reflect on memory, resistance, racial capitalism, and institutional care.

Panelists:

• Charlotte van Braam – Artist-researcher and educator, Netherlands
• Christian Reeder – Scholar, curator, and cultural anthropologist, USA
• Jéssica Hipolito – Museologist, educator, and researcher, Brazil
• Leilani Wong – Multidisciplinary researcher, French Polynesia

This online event was free and open to all.

Call for Papers

This year’s theme, inspired by the Beatles’ 1965 album Help! and MEG’s own founding in 1975 as a kind of self-help group, invited critical engagement with the concept of help in museum contexts. Participants were asked to consider:

• Defining the term – What does help mean in the context of museums, particularly in the context of Global Cultures or ethnographic collections? Why is help something we should or shouldn’t consider in the museum context? Is ‘help’ the right word?
• Who needs help? What needs help? Who is helping whom? Staff, community partners, ourselves…
• How, when, and where should help happen? Where can museums look to for help today? How can we ensure that ‘help’ does not become an extractive, performative, or colonial exercise?
• Practice and Help – Can methodologies and approaches to education, exhibitions, curation and collections care provide help? Or create spaces for providing help?
• Process and Help – How can guidelines, protocols, processes, and ethical guidelines be leveraged to ensure help is central to the work of museums?
• Programs and Help – Can offerings beyond exhibitions and displays become opportunities for care, support, and exchange?

Speakers explored these questions through case studies, research, and reflections from a wide range of contexts. In addition to traditional papers and work-in-progress updates, the 2025 conference introduced panel discussions. These sessions featured short provocations from multiple contributors followed by guided conversation, offering space for more collaborative exploration of the conference themes.

Conference Bursaries

MEG awarded two bursaries of up to £300 each to support UK-based conference participants without institutional funding. We were pleased to support the attendance of:

• Monica Janowski (University of Hull) – Bringing the Hull University SE Asia Museum back to life: the role of volunteers (Work in Progress)
• Gabriel Olubenga Matesun (University of Ibadan, Nigeria) – Unveiling the History and Tradition in a Digital Space

Both recipients were invited to contribute reflections on their experiences, which will be shared on the MEG blog.