Royal Anthropological Institute / British Museum / SOAS

The Art, Materiality and Representation  conference will be held 1 to 3 June 2018 at the British Museum, Clore Centre and SOAS, Senate House.

Please browse the full list of panels and decide where to propose your paper. All proposals must be made via the online form that can be found on each panel page.

Proposals should consist of a paper title, a (very) short abstract of <300 characters and an abstract of 250 words.  On submission the proposal, the proposing author (but not any co-authors listed) will receive automated email confirming receipt. If you do not receive thisemail, please first check the login environment (click login on the left) to see if your proposal is there.  If it is, it simply means confirmation got spammed or lost; and if it is not, it means you need re-submit, as process went wrong somewhere.

A paper can only be submitted once and a maximum of two papers can be submitted per person. 

Proposals will be marked as pending until the end of the Call for papers. Convenors will then be asked to make their decisions over the papers proposed to their workshop by 20 January 2018 and to communicate those to the proposers, marking them up within the login environment (Cocoa). Papers which are neither accepted nor rejected, but marked for 'transfer', will then be considered by the Conference Committee to see where else they might fit in the conference programme. There is no guarantee that such papers can be re-housed. We aim to resolve all transfers by 22 February 2018.

  • (P001) Making images, making worlds. Art-Process-Archaeology
  • (P002) Art as Ethnography/Ethnography as Art
  • (P003) Representing and Depicting Animals
  • (P004) The changing patronage and aesthetics of India's art and museum institutions
  • (P005) Materials for the sacred. Interdisciplinary visions on religious images and objects of the past
  • (P006) Museums of Asian Arts outside Asia: Questioning Artefacts, Cultures and Identities
  • (P007) Aesthetics and the making of religious collectivities
  • (P008) Anthropology in the Art Museum
  • (P009) Art and Personhood in the Historical Moment: Rethinking Gell and Strathern.
  • (P010) Australian Aboriginal artists, the archive and cross-cultural collaborations
  • (P011) The effects of digitisation: art, object, knowledge, responsibility
  • (P012) Dis/enchantment and the popular arts in Nigeria
  • (P013) Drawings Of, Drawings By, and Drawings With...
  • (P014) Representing 'Modern' Global, Local and Imperial Histories in Object-Centred Museums
  • (P015) Breaking the Silence: Heritage Objects and Cultural Memory
  • (P016) Art, Authenticity and Authority: Traversing the Power Struggles
  • (P017) Seeing Past the Settler Gaze: Objects and Objectivity in the Post-Colonial Archive
  • (P018) Notions of Failure in Art and Anthropology
  • (P019) Art (and anthropology) beyond materiality and representation
  • (P020) Making, Materials and Recovery: Perspectives "from the inside"
  • (P021) Anthropological Traditions, Critical Theory and Museological Diversity
  • (P022) Doing, making, collaborating: art as anthropology
  • (P023) Fashioning Africa: performance, representation and identity
  • (P024) Material subjectivities and artistic expression in visual anthropology
  • (P025) Agile Objects: The Art and Anthropology of Re-materialization
  • (P026) Participation and Guardianship: On the Ownership of Images in Movement
  • (P027) Materialising the imagination: how people make ideas manifest
  • (P028) Mutable Materialities of Indigenous Ways of Life
  • (P029) Bodies of Archives/Archival Bodies
  • (P030) Art and History Museums in the Middle East as places of social and political production
  • (P031) Re Materializing Colour
  • (P032) Museum Affordances: Collections, Interventions, Exhibitions
  • (P033) Curating futures
  • (P034) Cultural Professional Practice in the Age of Globalisation
  • (P035) Art, Culture and Materiality in the Arabian Peninsula
  • (P036) Ethnography and the repatriation of artistic heritage
  • (P037) Museums as contested terrains: Memory work and politics of representation in Greater China
  • (P038) A clinical epistemology of the anthropology of art: theoretical, practical and disciplinary implications
  • (P039) Liberating the past or haunting the future?
  • (P040) Art and Material Culture in Prehistoric Europe
  • (P041) A Grey Zone: Sites of Contemporary Art and Anthropology
  • (P042) Knowing by singing: song, acoustic ecologies and the overflow of meaning
  • (P043) Performance, design and aesthetics
  • (P044) Revealing Histories of Violence: The Representational Politics of Trace
  • (P045) From Palestine Out: Art and the Political Imagination
  • (P046) Exhibiting Anthropology beyond Museum Collections
  • (P047) Reconstructing Trade Systems: Challenging Provenance in a Time of Resource Abundance
  • (P048) The Future of Anthropological Representation: Contemporary Art and/in the Ethnographic Museum
  • (P049) Beauty and the Beast: photography, the body and sexual discourse in the Middle East and Central Eurasia
  • (P050) Re-thinking Source Communities: Plural, Urban Indigenous Communities and Cosmopolitan Objects
  • (P051) The indigenous city: ecologies, imaginations and the urban space in Latin America
  • (P052) Artefacts and visual systems in Oceania and America
  • (P053) Ethnographies of Art, Materiality and Representation: Between Art History and Anthropology, A SOAS Tradition
  • (P054) Ephemeral, transformational and collaborative: Ethnographies of art events
  • (P055) Art of critique, craft of knowing: caricature and anthropology
  • (P056) Photography and Political Belonging
  • (P057) The Aesthetics of Modelling: patterns, politics and pleasure in visual representations
  • (P058) Making and Growing: the art of gardens
  • (P059) "Culture in Action": Between Performance and Ethnography
  • (P060) What makes an artist? Examining the social and pedagogical influence in being and becoming artists
  • (P061) Amazonian Contemporary Art, and its Impacts in Fixing Imaginaries in Transmutational Cultures
  • (P062) Design Anthropology: Uniting experience and imagination in the midst of social and material transformation
  • (P063) Heritage, beyond materiality: intangible cultural heritage, collaborative methodologies and imaginations of the future
  • (P064) Redefining the curator, curatorial practice, and curated spaces in anthropology
  • (P065) The state of the art: the anthropology of art and the anthropology of the state
  • (P066) Art with/for the community: anthropological perspectives
  • (P067) Ambivalence about art: dilemmas for ethnographic museums.
  • (P068) The Future of Craft: Apprenticeship, Transmission and Heritage
  • (P069) Confluences of Art History and Anthropology
  • (P070) Apprenticeship: Illuminating Persons and Places through Shared Practice and Performance
  • (P071) Revisiting Materiality, Knowledge Production and Exchange in the Field
  • (P072) Making Research Material: Anthropology, Creative Art, and New Materialisms
  • (P073) Tourism, Materiality, Representation and 'the Large'
  • (P074) Going beyond the contemporary? Art, anthropology, ontology
  • (P075) Art and Autonomy Across the Global South
  • (P076) Hybridity Between the Practice of Art and Ethnography
  • (P077) Urban Memories: Mobility, Materiality and Photographic Practice
  • (P078) Art, cinema and animism in Modernity and Extra-modernity
  • (P079) For an anthropology of the art world: Exploring institutions, actors and art works between circulation and territorialisation processes
  • (P080) Anthropology in mixed media
  • (P081) Comparing Notes: The Sacred and the Self Realised in Art
  • (P082) Matters of the Spirit: Mapping Brazilian, Cuban, and Haitian Ritual Aesthetics in the Afro-Atlantic
  • (P083) 21st Century Orientalism: Moral Relativism and the Question of Time
  • (P084) Aesthetics and Performativity: Form and substance in cultural politics
  • (P085) Containers / Containment
  • (P086) A Museum of Architecture: Challenging Representation(s)
  • (P087) Stories with things: processing materials and generating social worlds
  • (P088) Deliberate Destruction of Cultural Heritage
  • (P089) The Anthropology of Creativity in Art
  • (P090) Relating to Raptors: The Art of Human Engagements with Birds of Prey
  • (P091) Anthropologies of witnessing: imaginaries, technologies, practices
  • (P092) The art of infrastructure
  • (P093) The Performativity of Matter: Decolonial Materialist Practices in/from the Global South
  • (P094) Creative Art/Anthropology Praxis as Revelation and Resistance
  • (P095) Organ transplantation and art: The politics and ethics of representation
  • (P096) Humanism in the Anthropology Museum?
  • (P097) Art and Craft and the Politics of Re-inventing Tradition in Postcolonial Spaces
  • (P098) Beauty and its Dilemmas
  • (P099) Representations of displacement and the struggle for home and homemaking
  • (P100) Collections as Currency? Objects, Exchange, Values and Institutions
  • (P101) Art, Religion and Oneiric Experiences: Reflections and Representations among Middle Eastern communities and beyond