Call for Papers: Restorative Justice. Heritage Practices, Narratives, and Futures of Conservation
How can practices of care advance justice in museums and beyond? And how can museums, archives, universities, and other sites of heritage contribute to more just futures?
The Global Conservation: Histories and Theories (GloCo) project at the University of Vienna invites contributions to the international conference Restorative Justice. Heritage Practices, Narratives, and Futures of Conservation, taking place in Vienna in October 2027.
The conference brings together scholars, practitioners, researchers, artists, and community members to examine how practices of preservation, care, and conservation intersect with questions of justice, power, memory, and repair. Contributions are invited that engage with the plurality of perspectives, methods, and experiences shaping heritage practices and the futures they help create.
The Call for Papers welcomes proposals addressing three core themes:
Justice in storage, conservation labs, and beyond – care, labour, responsibility, participation, and unequal power relations in heritage practices.
Words, histories, and epistemologies – situated histories of care and conservation, terminology, local epistemologies, and hierarchies within museums and other institutions.
Memory, archives, and erasure – community and counter-archives, oral and intergenerational histories, language, memory, and the power relations shaping what is preserved and remembered.
We invite proposals of up to 300 words accompanied by a short biography.
Deadline: 30 October 2026
Conference: October 2027, University of Vienna, Austria
Organized by: Noémie Étienne, Cécile Mendy, Maeva Pimo, Renée Riedler, Alisa Santikarn, and Ruby Satele
Please find the full Call for Papers, including further information on the themes and submission process, available for download below.
For more information on the GloCo project, visit the Global Conservation project website and the GloCo glossary.