This conference explores how makers, materials, and creative practices can transform understanding of museum collections and narratives.

Museums are filled with objects that embody the knowledge, decisions, and labour of countless makers. Yet the individuals behind these collections are often obscured by histories of collecting, classification, and display. Bringing makers back into focus raises new questions about how museum collections are understood, interpreted, and experienced.

This conference explores making as both a material practice and an interpretive framework. Through papers, discussion, and hands-on workshops, participants will consider what museum objects can reveal about the people who created them, the skills and materials involved in their production, and the social, cultural, and political worlds in which they were made. How might closer attention to processes of making reshape museum narratives? What forms of knowledge become visible when objects are approached through the practices, techniques, and experiences of their makers?

Drawing on research from the AHRC-funded *Making the Museum* project, the conference brings together academics, museum professionals, artists, craftspeople, and community practitioners to explore museums as places where making continues to generate new knowledge. By placing historical collections in conversation with contemporary practice, the event invites participants to reconsider the relationships between objects, makers, and museums, and to imagine new ways of understanding collections through the creative agency of those who brought them into being.

This conference forms part of the ‘Making the Museum’ Project; the first major research project in an ethnographic museum to investigate maker identities and agencies across the breadth of its collections. Through detailed analysis of the Museum’s database, associated documentation, objects and archives, alongside a pioneering series of maker research fellowships the project aims to transform our understanding of the knowledge, skills, and cosmologies embedded in objects, as well as their continuing power for people today.

Find out more at: https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/making-museum

The conference will take place in the Tanner Room, with coffee breaks taking place in the Nadel Room, Linacre College, Oxford. Lunch will be included.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Dr. Gwyneira Isaac – Cultural Revitalization and The Remaking of the Anthropological Museum

Dr. Chris Wingfield – Seeing the Wood or the Trees: Museums After Objecthood?

PANEL 1: RECENTRING MAKERS

Elaine D. Alexie – Reconnecting Knowledge: Learning from Historical Gwich’in Sewing in UK Museum Collections

Haidamteu Zeme – Searching for Makers: Reflections on Un/Translating Archives

PANEL 2: TECHNICAL MAKING AND THE MUSEUM

Richard Dunn – As A Rule: Understanding the Making of Standardized Objects

Fern Aldous – Tracing the Makers: Exploring the Division Between Art, Craft and Technical Drawing

Lily Crowther – Making the Built Environment: Artisans as Experts in the Museum of Construction & Building Materials, 1850s-80s

PANEL 3: UNDER-RECOGNISED MAKERS OF MUSEUM OBJECTS

Maya Wassell Smith – Maritime Making: Observing and Uncovering Sailors’ Craft Practice

Uwagbale Edward-Ekpu – Distinguishing the Makers of The Brass Sheet Objects in The Benin Bronze Collection

Veronika Poier – Shadow Satire: Puppets snd Their Makers In 17th Century Istanbul in The Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum

PANEL 4: MAKING AS RESEARCH AND MUSEUM PRACTICE

Christopher Mchugh – Seto Mono*: Telling the Story of Japan’s Ceramic Figurine Makers through Creative Ceramic Practice

Eulilee Brown – Safeguarding Making: Museums and Craft Knowledge in Shetland

Making the Museum Team – Maker Residencies as Museum Research and Practice

PANEL 5: CONCEPTUALISING MAKING IN THE MUSEUM

Felix Sattler and Anna Simandiraki-Grimshaw – Making Replicas, Making Knowledge: Replicas as Epistemic Objects and Methodological Tools for Museum History

Sophie Pitman – Remaking the Renaissance: Reconstruction as Curatorial Intervention

Emily Hayes – Making Rites of Space at a Shrine Geography

PANEL 6: MAKING IN THE MUSEUM

Celine Camps – (Re)Assembling Arts: The Invisible Screwmaker and the Construction of Objects in The Early Modern German-Speaking Lands

Claire Wintle – Re-Making in The Museum: Technical Staff and The Adaptation Of Ethnographic Collections in Post-War British Museums

Inés Moreno – Fleeting Presences: Production, Skills and Knowledge in Two Technical Museums

Description supplied by the event organiser.