Material Culture of the Atlantic: Conference Recap

From May 14–16, 2025, the Material Culture Collective hosted its inaugural conference, Material Culture of the Atlantic, at Dalhousie University’s Weldon Law Building. Bringing together scholars, museum professionals, students, and community researchers from across the Atlantic provinces, Ontario, and Quebec the conference marked an important moment for object-based scholarship in the region. Over three days, nearly seventy-five attendees gathered to explore how objects shape cultural, historical, social, and embodied experience, with close to forty papers presented across fifteen panels.

The conference opened with welcoming remarks from Lisa Binkley (Dalhousie University), who grounded the gathering in place and emphasized shared responsibility, care, and collaboration. These themes resonated throughout the conference, setting the tone for generous dialogue and sustained engagement across disciplinary, institutional, and community boundaries.

Panels explored a wide range of themes, including craft and making, colonialism, memory and commemoration, trade and circulation, architecture and built heritage, affect and embodiment, gender, and the everyday. Presenters examined objects as sites of power, care, resistance, and meaning—demonstrating how material culture methodologies can illuminate histories often marginalized or overlooked within textual archives. Across sessions, conversations repeatedly returned to questions of scale, intimacy, labour, and ethics, underscoring the vitality of material culture as both a scholarly and relational practice.

In addition to traditional paper sessions, the conference emphasized hands-on, participatory engagement through three workshops. Lisa Bower’s workshop on exhibition practices invited participants to think critically about curatorial decision-making, interpretation, and institutional constraints. Jen Frail’s participatory quilting workshop offered a tactile and collective approach to storytelling and memory-making, while Cheryl Simon’s workshop explored quillwork within Indigenous legal frameworks, foregrounding Indigenous material practices as living systems of knowledge and law. Together, these workshops embodied the conference’s commitment to learning with objects, not simply about them.

Two evening keynote lectures anchored the conference and drew together many of its central themes.

Dr. Jonathan Fowler (Saint Mary’s University) opened with “Texture, Atmosphere, and Attrition: Mapping Built Heritage in Halifax,” inviting attendees to think materially about urban space and heritage erosion.

Dr. Joan Schwartz (Queen’s University, Emeritus) closed with “The Photograph as Material Culture and the Material Culture of Archives,” an elegant reflection on the tactile life of images and the ethics of visual stewardship.

These talks offered expansive reflections on material culture’s methodological possibilities and ethical responsibilities, situating Atlantic-focused scholarship within broader national and international conversations.

The conference concluded with a roundtable on the future of material culture scholarship in Atlantic Canada, chaired by Lisa Binkley and Holly Dickinson, where participants shared ideas for collaboration, community-based research, and future gatherings.

Words and ideas captured on the whiteboard during the closing roundtable, reflecting collective questions, priorities, and future directions for material culture research.

Beyond formal programming, the conference created ample space for informal exchange—over shared meals, coffee breaks, and evening conversations. These moments of connection proved just as generative as the panels themselves, fostering new collaborations and reinforcing the value of gathering in person around shared interests and objects.

“It felt like the start of something bigger—an ongoing conversation between museums, universities, and communities,” one attendee remarked.

Building on the strength and diversity of the papers presented, conference organizers are currently preparing two edited volumes. The first is a special issue of Material Culture Review, and the second is an edited collection of essays under review with Memorial University Press. Together, these volumes respond to and extend the legacy of Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture (1991), edited by Dr. Gerald Pocius (Memorial University, Emeritus). That foundational volume emerged from Pocius’s landmark 1986 conference of the same name, which brought together scholars such as Henry Glassie, Christopher Tilley, and Adrienne Hood and played a pivotal role in shaping material culture studies in North America. The forthcoming volumes aim to reflect the distinctive histories, geographies, and material practices of the Atlantic region while contributing to broader methodological debates.

Conference organizers Holly Dickinson and Lisa Binkley during the inaugural Material Culture of the Atlantic conference at Dalhousie University.

The success of Material Culture of the Atlantic affirmed the need for spaces that centre object-based research, foster interdisciplinary exchange, and value community-engaged scholarship. For the Material Culture Collective, the conference marked both a beginning and a commitment—to continued collaboration, to gathering around objects, and to sustaining a vibrant network of material culture research in Atlantic Canada and beyond.

We extend our sincere thanks to all presenters, workshop leaders, keynote speakers, attendees, volunteers, and supporters who made this inaugural conference possible. We look forward to building on this momentum in future MCC programming.