Conference

Global Restitution & Reparative Efforts in Museums
A Hybrid Interdisciplinary Conference

October 29-30, 2026
Online & In-person 
University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA

KU’s Center for Global and International Studies, Kansas African Studies Center, University Honors Program, and Spencer Museum of Art will host a two-day hybrid interdisciplinary conference on global restitution and reparative efforts in museums. This conference seeks to foster critical and comparative conversations about the role of restitution within contemporary museology, particularly as it exists on an international level. It aims to explore the legal, cultural, diplomatic, financial, and historical factors that contribute to and prohibit progress, while providing a forum to discuss strategies that have shown promise for advancing reparative efforts and strengthening museums as shared spaces of practice.   

We offer a special thanks to KU units who are sponsoring the conference: Art History, Biodiversity Institute/ Natural History Museum, Center for Global and International Studies, Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Indigenous Studies Program, Kansas African Studies Center, Museum Studies, Spencer Museum of Art, and University Honors Program.

Conference focus 

Restitution has emerged as a major global question that lies at the intersection of museums, archives, law, history, anthropology, Indigenous sovereignty, cultural memory, race and ethnicity, colonialism, and international politics. In recent years, the colonialist legacies of western museums has led institutions across the U.S. and Europe to reconsider their missions as it relates to the stewardship, collection and display of material culture, particularly objects held outside of their country of origin. This conference seeks to illuminate future pathways forward for museums and source communities by highlighting new and varied approaches to collaboration and partnership, as well as the diversity of outcomes produced by these efforts. Through critical conversations across disciplines and geographies, sessions will consider the opportunities and challenges presented by reparative efforts inside and outside of museums, including  repatriation (or physical transfer), propatriation, reciprocal loans/acquisitions, long term stewardship agreements, and co-curated exhibitions, dialogues fostered by and through collaborations with contemporary artists, as well as foregrounding ethical and transparent frameworks to shape these and other practices.