Museum Ethnographers Group Conference (MEG): Un-Disciplining the Museum? Changing Practices of Care, Knowledge and Display

The MEG Conference and AGM will take place at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Centre of Material Culture, University of Cambridge, 18–19th April 2023.

The MEG meeting will coincide with MAA’s special exhibition COLOUR: Art, Science and Power (26 July – 23 April), which integrates insights from anthropology, the arts, humanities and sciences and draws on the collections of the eight University of Cambridge Museums.

The conference explores the museum as a bringing together of different academic and professional disciplines, and the tensions and confluences emerging in between. We will think about 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?

A call for papers was launched on 23 December 2022.