Working group on Museums, Material Culture and Communities of Practice
The working group Museums, Material Culture and Communities of Practice serves as a platform for dialogue, collaboration, and networking among ethnologists, folklorists, and other researchers interested in theorising the museum practices in Europe and beyond. Historically, museums have focused on collecting, preserving and researching material objects. In our understanding, museums not only offer material for researchers through their collections and archives, but they are also partners in and objects of research that can have national, local and personal significance.
Founded at the SIEF Congress in Zagreb in 2015, the group initially named Museums and Material Culture aimed to strengthen connections between ethnologists and the museum sector, with a focus on defining museums and analysing their role in knowledge production. The working group was also intended as a forum for further developing the field of material studies within ethnology. In 2025, in Aberdeen, the group expanded its scope to the communities of practice, including museum professionals, visitors, artists, activists, and source communities, whose agency actively shapes museum practices. This shift aligns with the evolving policies of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which emphasise the social role of museums and the importance of inclusive dialogues and collaborative partnerships.
Mission
Our mission is to advance critical and collaborative research on museums, material culture, and communities associated with all aspects of museum practice. Our working group is interested in the ways materialities of things shape human thought, emotions, social relations and bodily experiences. A further area of focus is how objects, collections and studies of material culture have been utilised to strengthen certain world views or agendas. We encourage explorations of the meanings ascribed to material culture throughout the processes of heritagisation and musealisation and seek to foster new critical approaches to material culture. We are equally interested in how the process of musealisation and the concept of museums are interpreted by various communities of practice, and we see museums as active sites of knowledge production and as well as social engagement.
We also aim to strengthen the role of ethnology and folklore studies in shaping contemporary museum and heritage debates and will strive to develop new approaches to study museums from ethnological and folkloristic perspectives. By studying museums through the lens of ethnography, oral history, and cultural analysis, we seek to generate more nuanced knowledge of how collections communicate relationships between past and present. In doing so, we examine whose meanings of material culture are preserved or marginalized in museums, how professional roles are evolving, and how knowledge is produced through everyday museum work.
To carry out our mission, we will:
- Build a transnational and interdisciplinary network that facilitates the development of joint research applications, exchange of fieldwork experiences, and other forms of cooperation between the museum scholars and practitioners.
- Create spaces for exchanging methodological practices by focusing on ethnographic fieldwork in museums, participatory and community-based approaches, and experimental formats of exhibition-making and knowledge production.
- Draw on the expertise of colleagues working in museums to reflect on contemporary discourses and issues of the museum sector – such as decolonisation, repatriation, sustainability, or digital transformation – and bring them to the attention of the research community.
- Implement a series of professional activities between the years of SIEF congresses, such as thematic seminars and a reading group on key texts in material culture and museum studies.
- Develop specific strategies to connect with ICOM and related networks by initiating joint sessions, knowledge exchange formats, and cross-sector partnerships.
- Convene regularly and elect a governing body, as stated in the General Statutes for SIEF Working Groups.
- Collaborate with other SIEF Working groups, such as the Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property and the Folk Arts and Vernacular Creativity Working Group.
