The Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) Conference and AGM will take place at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford on 23–24 April 2026. The conference is organised by Rethinking Relationships, an Arts Council England–funded programme that seeks to develop new forms of museum practice grounded in equitable collaboration with descendant communities.

Calls for “equitable collaboration” now circulate widely across museums. Yet collaboration remains uneven, fragile, and often constrained by institutional hierarchies, colonial legacies, funding structures, and professional norms. This conference asks what collaboration actually does, both inside museums, and for the communities who choose to collaborate. What does collaboration fail to do/undo?

We invite contributions from those who are collaborating with museums, as well as museum professionals and academics, that critically examine both the possibilities and limits of equitable collaboration in contemporary museum practice. While Rethinking Relationships focuses on working with African partners, this conference is not geographically limited. We welcome proposals engaging with collaborative work in any regional, institutional, or disciplinary context.

Rather than celebrating collaboration as an unqualified good, we are interested in work that grapples with tension, refusal, compromise, and disruption. What happens when collaboration exposes incompatible expectations, unequal risks, or conflicting claims to authority? When does collaboration redistribute power, and when does it merely repackage it?

Themes for papers and discussion might include (but are not limited to):

• Partnerships and access: barriers, conditions, sustainability, and the uneven costs of collaboration
• Multiple perspectives: interpretation, disagreement, and managing conflict between communities, institutions, and individuals
• Institutional constraint: navigating colonial legacies, governance structures, and professional accountability
• Creative and artistic responses: collaboration as method, critique, or disruption
• Cross-museum working: infrastructures, solidarities, and limits of institutional cooperation
• Disruption: moments when collaboration unsettles institutional routines, narratives, or authority

We particularly welcome papers that reflect critically on practice, ask uncomfortable questions, or challenge established collaborative models rather than simply reproducing them.

Participants wanting to contribute a twenty minute paper should send a proposal of not more than 250 words and a 50 word biography. Examples of biographies and abstracts can be found in the MEG 2025 Conference Program. Please send both to RethinkingRelationships@prm.ox.ac.uk by 5pm on the 5th of March.

Call for Films

In addition to traditional formats, we also warmly invite submissions of short films, which will be screened alongside films created in collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum within a dedicated workshop space. With a limit of 5 minutes, these works will be presented without formal introductions by their creators, providing an informal and engaging opportunity to share and encounter work that resonates with the conference’s core themes

Conference Bursaries:

We are offering two UK-based bursaries aimed at people working (paid or voluntary) or wanting to work in UK museums without institutional support to attend the conference. Each of these bursaries are of up to £300. They are meant to assist with conference fee, membership, travel, accommodation, and food.  We also count with one international bursary of £1,000 meant to assist with costs associated with international travel to and from the conference, visa expenses, accommodation, and conference registration. We ask that individuals in receipt of the MEG bursary write up their recollections of the conference in a blog for the MEG website (by the end of June 2026).

Applications are especially welcome from people who have been historically marginalised, including scholars who are women, BAME, LGBTQI+, disabled or have a long-term health condition, first generation scholars, carers, unemployed etc.

If you are interested in applying for a bursary, please complete this application form, which will include a statement of up to 500 words to by 19 March 2026. Please state why you want to attend the MEG Conference, the title of your paper or panel (if applicable), how attendance will benefit your study/work, and how you will share your learning. Applications will be assessed on the perceived benefits of attending and the fit with MEG’s aspirations.

Please note that the bursary recipient will be responsible for making their own travel and accommodation arrangements. Members of the MEG Committee are unable to undertake bookings on the recipient’s behalf.