Visiting the Museum: New Perspectives and Future Directions International ConferenceInfo Location Contact More Info Event Information
DescriptionWe are pleased to announce that registration is open for the upcoming interdisciplinary conference on Visiting the Museum: New Perspectives and Future Directions, 16-17 April 2026. Hosted by the Centre for Design History, University of Brighton, UK, this international event will bring together researchers and practitioners to critically explore museum visiting as a contemporary cultural, social and political practice.
We hope that this conference will establish new theoretical, practice-orientated, and methodological foundations for future practice and research on museum visiting.
The full conference will be shared in the coming weeks. Registration will be charged at £45.00. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Event Location
ContactFor informal enquiries, contact a.potts4@brighton.ac.uk More InformationNew agendas in Museum Visiting:
Museum practice is currently in a state of flux. Across the world, shifting political and cultural contexts have radically reframed public expectations of museums, and understanding of the roles and identities of their visitors. In response, practitioners are experimenting and innovating to respond to visitor agendas and reframe the ways that visitors engage with museums. This includes providing platforms for visitor-led social justice agendas, addressing visitor wellbeing, sustaining a diversity of approaches to learning, and creating more welcoming and accessible spaces. Visiting the Museum will learn from and interrogate this museum practice and develop a new framework for understanding museum visitors.
In the late-twentieth century, museum visiting emerged as a distinct research area that shed light on visitors’ needs, interests and agency. Today, this scholarship is still valid, but in the context of changing political and cultural demands on museums and complex sector responses, the idea of ‘the visitor’ has become more complex and diffuse. In parallel, research on visitors has become more dispersed across disciplines and fields of practice and scholarship. This conference will reassert museum visiting as a distinct subject of research and build an interdisciplinary network of researchers and practitioners. In doing so, we aim to understand what is distinctive and significant about museum visiting as a contemporary practice.
Confirmed speakers include:
· Professor Laurajane Smith, Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies, Australian National University · Dr Porchia Moore, Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, University of Florida, and Co-Creator of The Visitors of Color Project · Professor Divya Tolia-Kelly, Professor of Geography and Heritage Studies, University of Sussex · Professor Emily Dawson, Professor of Education, Science and Society, University College London · Professor Alison Eardley, Professor of Museums, Inclusion and Psychology, University of Westminster · Professor Rhiannon Mason, Professor of Heritage and Cultural Studies, Newcastle University · Professor Theano Moussouri, Professor of Museum Studies, University College London · And practitioners from the British Museum, Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Denmark, and more. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||