[in English, in French] Call for Papers for the international symposium "Provenance Research: Perspectives on Archaeology, Collections and Circulation of Antiquities from the West Asia and North Africa Region" on 9–10 December 2027 at the INHA in Paris.
The Center for Global and International Studies, the Kansas African Studies Center, the Spencer Museum of Art, and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas invite proposals for a two-day hybrid interdisciplinary conference on global restitution and reparative efforts in museums.
The proposed workshop intends to analyze how memories of European colonialism, Soviet communism, and fascism have become intertwined, and with what effects. It intends to provide new impulses and launch more comprehensive explorations. To close the analytical gap, we shall aim to combine approaches from intellectual and conceptual history with those in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies; further approaches, or combinations of them, are most welcome too.
The conference strands will discuss Heritage Diplomacy, focussing on: • Museums, archives, and heritage institutions in international relations • Restitution, repatriation, and cultural diplomacy • Heritage diplomacy and international cultural cooperation in the postcolonial framework
The Association on American Indian Affairs is seeking proposals for panels, workshops, training and other sessions that will support the 12th Annual Repatriation Conference theme “Tending the Fire – Sustaining the Journey Home.” The Conference will be completely virtual and take place Thursdays and Fridays in the month of February 2027.
Contemporary discourses concerning cultural property have focused on that which is easily defined as ‘cultural’: artworks and antiquities, sacred artifacts, perhaps ancestral human remains or ethnological collections. Natural history museums remain largely unaffected by many of the legal and political issues of ownership, stewardship, conservation, and justice which have begun to concern museum staff, civil society, and governments in the Global North and Global South alike. This theme for the 2027 volume of the International Journal of Cultural Property puts a spotlight on natural history specimens and collections.
This symposium interrogates processes of return in Latin America not as inherently reparative gestures, but as practices that can be ambivalent—capable both of reproducing colonial logics and of resistance and re-articulation of indigenous peoples and traditional communities. In particular, we aim to examine how different regimes of value —state, scientific, Indigenous and traditional— come into friction, and to what extent contemporary heritage frameworks operate as mechanisms that depoliticise struggles over the control of ancestors. Symposium 23-27 November 2026.
Much of the scholarly attention for decolonisation and restitution in English has centred on developments in the Anglophone world. A special Issue - Portuguese Studies Review will bring together new studies on parallel and emerging developments within the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world.
For an issue about 'Measuring Cultural Heritage: Indicators for Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Development', the e-journal Santander Art, Culture & Law Review welcomes contributions from legal scholars, policymakers, cultural heritage practitioners, and interdisciplinary researchers. Submissions should offer original research, comparative analysis, or innovative methodologies that contribute to the understanding, assessment, and governance of cultural heritage.
The Freer Research Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and the Zentralarchiv and Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz announce their second in-person symposium dedicated to the provenance of Asian art, occurring November 11–13, 2026, on Museum Island in Berlin, Germany.
University collections are more than any others, linked to the definition and transmission of knowledge. The Musée L, UCLouvain's university museum, is launching a new open-access online scientific journal dedicated to university collections and museums: UniMusea – Research and Practices on University Collections.
Deliberate avoidance, lack of interest, or lack of sources, African arts have found themselves to the margins of the history of spoliations, destruction and displacement of works of art during the 1933-45 period, with research largely focusing on European art. Conference on 13 November 2025 in Paris.
