This paper critically examines the increasingly prevalent trend in heritage and museum exhibition practices that foreground the experiences of non-Indigenous visitors, privileging universalist and cosmopolitan frameworks, often at the expense of Indigenous communities, epistemologies, and sovereignty.

Taonga tūturu are often discovered through weather events, inheritance, or chance encounters, confronting people with emotional, ethical, and legal questions guided by the Protected Objects Act 1975. Museums sit at the centre of these interactions, yet their role is shaped by colonial histories and ongoing mistrust between institutions, the public, and Māori. Drawing on a 2026 Master’s thesis using literature, case studies, and interviews, this paper explores how museums in Aotearoa New Zealand navigate the Act in practice. It highlights the ethical dilemmas faced by museum workers and the emotions experienced by finders of taonga, including attachment and suspicion. Findings emphasise Māori-led processes, relationship-building with kaitiaki, proactive public education, and the need for clearer guidance amid sectoral uncertainty.

This paper examines how policy frameworks in Flanders (Belgium) shape the roles of municipal archives and museums in addressing major societal challenges such as inequality, democratic backsliding and social polarisation. Starting from a network‑organisations perspective, it argues that sustainable impact requires collaboration in which institutions contribute from their own contextual and professional strengths, rather than being treated as a homogeneous sector. Using interviews with municipal archivists, museum professionals and supralocal policymakers, the paper shows how a public‑oriented “integrated heritage” paradigm has been appropriated through a predominantly museal reading of practice, marginalising archives within the official heritage assemblage. It argues for understanding archives and museums as complementary actors in relational heritage ecosystems, and calls on critical heritage studies to take archival specificities seriously as a condition for liberal‑democratic heritage work.

This paper presents “One Month, One Community”, a programme of the museum at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation du Sénégal (CRDS) in Saint-Louis. Twice a year, the museum dedicates one month of its activities to a specific community living in Senegal, working with community members to collect objects, record oral histories, co-curate a small exhibition, and share performances and food. The programme also mobilises joking kinship (cousinage à plaisanterie) by appointing a patron from the community’s joking cousin group.

From my position as a Senegalese museum professional and curator, I reflect on how this initiative allows communities to take back the floor in an African public museum, while also revealing tensions around representation, gender, religion and power. The paper shows how “One Month, One Community” weaves fragile but meaningful relations between museum and communities, in direct conversation with the ACHS 2026 theme of relational heritage spaces.