Conference in Leiden, the Netherlands, October 27-30, 2025.

Call for Submissions

The opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum has been hailed as a major museological achievement, a cutting-edge and high-tech advancement with the potential to shift global discourses on the repatriation of Pharaonic antiquities. And yet, little emphasis has been placed on how such discourses entrench existing museological norms, situating categories of “antiquity”, “artifact”, “treasure”, and “discovery” through extractive, colonial frameworks.

Decolonizing Archaeological Epistemologies is a conference critically examining archaeological histories and practices, proposing instead more expansive, democratic, and liberatory approaches to the past and material culture, challenging extant museological, academic, economic, and legal systems governing the ways that material culture is collected, studied, and traded. With implications spanning beyond Egyptology to archaeology, museology, and historical disciplines more broadly, this conference proposes a counter-colonial approach that rethinks the status of the historical object in the public eye.

Sessions include:

• Panel 1 – Beyond “treasure”; challenging artifactual ontologies and epistemologies
• Panel 2 – Counter-colonial museum exhibition strategies
• Panel 3 – Resisting archaeological extractivism; new approaches to field-based research
• Panel 4 – Community-based archaeology in theory and practice
• Panel 5 – Beyond the “thing itself”; digital and ephemeral approaches to archaeological collections
• Panel 6 – Who gets the past? New discourses in restitution, return, and repair

 
For more information: contact the organiser, Pansee Abou ElAtta.