Open call, Latvian National Museum of Literature and Music, June 2026
Museum in Collaboration: Professional Practice and Co-Created Heritage
Encouraging museums to be seen as a space of relationships, grounded in ethical co-responsibility, knowledge transformation, and the creation of shared meaning, we invite the submission of papers that draw attention to various forms of cooperation and engagement in museums.
The role of museums is not limited to the management of knowledge and collections. The key to a museum’s authority lies not only in institutional expertise, but in a thoughtfully implemented strategy to create an open environment for democratic participation, cooperation, and co-creation, emphasizing the phenomenon of connected professionality (Leontine Meijer-van Mensch, connective professionality).
Focusing on the role of the museum in current and future society, we will continue the discussion initiated at the previous conference on how museum professionalism is changing in a world increasingly dominated by digital tools, information overload, growing societal polarization, and fragile trust. Therefore, at the conference we will consider the museum in the context of the formation of civic, technological, and professional relationships, where we can reassess established assumptions, jointly reflect on responsibility towards heritage, and explore how museums can remain relevant in a society where both information use and participation habits are changing.
We invite museum and cultural heritage experts and practitioners; representatives and researchers of literature, music, the humanities and social sciences, as well as representatives of memory institutions from Latvia and abroad to participate with papers. Conference themes will be divided into separate sessions. Duration of presentations: 15 minutes. It is possible to submit a topic for a poster session with a 5-minute presentation.