Conference organiser: Anita Herle

This conference explored the museum as a bringing together of different academic and professional disciplines, and the tensions and confluences emerging in between. It reflected on practices of care and knowledge production, and how these are changing or need to change.

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge is an institution that proclaims its connection to two distinct but related academic disciplines. But emerging before or alongside the academic disciplines of archaeology and anthropology in Britain, this relationship has not always been evident or indeed comfortable. Scholars, practitioners and knowledge-holders from all disciplines and diverse backgrounds contributed to the collections and our institutional understanding of them. Over the course of its history the anthropology museum has been at the heart, on the periphery and cut adrift from its parent disciplines, their networks and their preoccupations. In an era where not only specific disciplines but the structures of academic disciplinarity more broadly are being challenged, what is the position of academic disciplines in the museum now, and vice versa?

What new practices of care and curation are demanded of the contemporary museum ethnographer? How does our work draw on multiple disciplinary traditions and ways of knowing? How does disciplinary inheritance shape, support or inhibit what is possible now and in the future?

Conference Themes

Changing and Challenging Documentation: How is cataloguing developing in response to external pressures, greater visibility or internal drivers?

Democratising Care; Democratising Knowledge: Examples of how decisions about collections care or interpretation are being opened up, shared or democratised, from community engagement and coproduction to structures of governance

Confidence and Comfort: Exploring and critiquing professional confidence in knowing and caring for ethnographic collections. Thinking about comfort and confidence in talking about issues for staff, governing bodies, audiences or communities. Accommodating discomfort, making safe spaces

Practice within and beyond disciplines: Examples of trans-disciplinary or non-disciplinary approaches and the insights or innovations they can bring

Histories of Change: Change and crisis are not new! A space for researchers and practitioners to present on historical research on transforming practice.

See the conference programme and abstracts of selected papers.

Read Catherine Hirst’s review of the conference.