ESF Research Conferences

Museums form an important part of the cultural heritage of all European countries. As institutions, however, they have remained focused on the nation state for historical, political and often for financial reasons, but many of the issues museums face today transcend national boundaries. This international European Science Foundation funded conference seeks to provide a platform for exchange, reflecting on the new EU-wide interest in museums as spaces of cultural encounter that occupy a unique position at the junction between 'the local', 'the national' and 'the global'.
Ten years ago James Clifford formulated his influential concept of museums as ‘contact zones’, highlighting museums as spaces of cultural encounter and drawing attention to the crucial interaction of researchers and practitioners.  His ideas have had a lasting impact on academics as well as policy makers.  The potential for museums to act as spaces for cultural encounter – though not always in the way imagined by Clifford – has animated academics, policy makers and museum practitioners.  This has led to a recent flourishing of ideas and practices focused on re-imagining the museum for the purposes of addressing imperial legacies, supporting ‘social inclusion’ or ‘empowering communities’. While academics and practitioners share an interest in museums as ‘contact zones’, strong relationships between academic theorising and practice have not always been effectively developed, nor has the importance of the theory developed through practice been translated back into theorising within the academy. The exchange that Clifford and others have proposed has been limited by institutional barriers between universities and museums, curricular barriers between academic subjects, and geographical barriers between museums that largely remain financed by, and focused on, the nation-state. 
As the title of the conference suggests, we aim to review the concept of the ‘contact zone’ in the light of recent research, policy directions and museum practice, reflecting an increasingly globalized world. The conference’s aim is to facilitate an interdisciplinary debate reflecting the museum’s potential as a meeting place for a wide range of academic subjects and non-academic participants. 
The conference will bring together leaders in a given field with papers and poster presentations from early career researchers. Keynote sessions by influential theorists and innovative practitioners will be supplemented with papers by early career researchers who will directly reflect on the conference themes through their own research.
We invite early career practitioners in museum studies, anthropology, art history, sociology, architecture, design, archaeology, and all related fields, as well as junior practitioners in museums, galleries, and archives, to submit papers relating (but not limited to) these key themes. We also welcome proposals for poster papers.  Papers must be in English and should be no more than 20 minutes in length.