[rete] CFP: Making the Museum: A conference on the historical presences and absences of makers and making in museums
Rebecca Martin
We invite you to submit abstracts for the conference 'Making the Museum: A conference on the historical presences and absences of makers and making in museums' to be held at Linacre College, Oxford (23–25 September 2026).
This conference is organised by the AHRC-funded research project Making the Museum, based at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Please see below for the full CFP and details for submission, venue accessibility, and funding availability.
All the best,
Becky
Dr Rebecca (Becky) Martin (she/her)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7094-5403
Pitt Rivers Museum | Making the Museum Project
Council Member | British Society for the History of Science
Check out the first publication from the Making the Museum project ‘Making the Museum’ and the archaeology of the Pitt Rivers Museum collection
Call for papers
Making the Museum: A conference on the historical presences and absences of makers and making in museums.
Oxford, UK. 23–25 September 2026
We invite 20-minute paper submissions on the theme of makers and making in the museum context for a forthcoming conference at Linacre College, Oxford (23–25 September 2026). This three-day conference will combine practical making sessions with an exploration of the AHRC-funded research project Making the Museum, which considers the way that makers and making have been understood in museums, both historically and in the present day.
Drawing on emerging research that repositions museums as dynamic assemblages shaped and influenced by the agency of those who made them, this event seeks to complement project work foregrounding the often-overlooked individuals whose labour, knowledge, and creativity constitute museum collections.
The conference seeks to address a critical gap in museology: the relative absence of systematic research on the identities, practices, and agencies of makers embedded within museum documentation, databases, and archives. Contributors are encouraged to engage with questions centred on how museums might be reinterpreted not as repositories of artefacts, but as emergent “communities” of objects that embody the social, cultural, and historical worlds of their creators.
We welcome contributions from any academic discipline, or from makers and practitioners, that explore (but are not limited to) the following questions:
- What is the potential for recovering maker identities that have been submerged in the past, due to biases in documentation and collection practices, for instance by using archival sources or published material, as well as oral history and local sources of information?
- To what extent and in what ways might museum objects / archival traces be considered as extending the agency of their makers / subjects?
- What hidden histories, such as those of material exploitation, colonial experiences, environmental and economic change, might material analysis of objects bring to the surface and which are inscribed by makers/subjects in objects and images?
- What can close material analysis of objects tell us about their makers that is not currently part of the narrative around them? Are certain skills, age, genders, life histories, and other stories about an object’s maker embedded in the way objects are made that can be read through new material ‘readings’ of the object?
- How might a methodological approach to the museum as a “community” of powerful objects created by its makers rather than donors, a collection that consists of the material extensions of maker agency on those who encounter it, transform our understanding of the ethnographic museum in the future?
Papers may also seek to address other themes relevant to the question of museums and making. We particularly encourage contributions that critically engage with existing museological methodologies and propose new frameworks for understanding museums as places of making in the past, present, and future. We also encourage contributions which address the above questions through the lens of sound collections, and woven, formed, and carved objects which have emerged as dominant themes of enquiry for the Making the Museum project.
By bringing together diverse perspectives, this conference aims to rethink the epistemological foundations of the museum as a community of things made by skilled people and to foster more equitable, inclusive, and reflexive practices of research and display.
Submission guidelines: Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted by 31 May 2026. Please include a short biography (100 words). We anticipate contacting successful submissions by mid-June 2026. Selected papers may be considered for publication in an edited volume.
Cost: Attendance at the conference is FREE, including refreshments.
Funding: Some funds for speakers to cover travel and accommodation costs will be available. If potential speakers do not have any institutional support for conference participation, they should contact the conference organisers to discuss.
Venue: All talks and social activities will take place at Linacre College, University of Oxford. To find out more about the College’s location and accessibility please see: https://www.accessguide.ox.ac.uk/linacre
Contact: Dr Rebecca Martin (becky....@prm.ox.ac.uk)
To unsubscribe, e-mail: rete-uns...@maillist.ox.ac.uk
For additional commands, e-mail: rete...@maillist.ox.ac.uk