Critical Conservation
Assembly #1
Communities OF Practice
DECEMBER 3-4, 2026
Conservation has historically been shaped by an understanding of its task as the technical stabilization of material objects, guided by professional expertise and institutional authority. In recent decades, however, the field has increasingly moved beyond this paradigm, embracing participatory, people-centered, relational, and process-oriented approaches to conservation. Yet questions remain about how far these shifts transform the structures through which conservation knowledge, authority, and responsibility are organized—and how they account for the diverse ways in which communities sustain, transmit, and transform cultural knowledge.
We are announcing Critical Conservation Assembly #1:
Communities OF Practice
DECEMBER 3-4, 2026
HKB Bern & online
Across many cultures, conservation takes place through care, repetition, renewal, storytelling, performance, remaking, and individual and collective memory. Cultural continuity is frequently maintained not through physical objects alone, but through embodied knowledge, relational practices, and intergenerational transmission. Such modes of care can be found in Indigenous knowledge systems as well as in contemporary contexts such as performance and digital art. At the same time, practices of transmission are often entangled with colonial histories, institutional frameworks, and economic realities, raising ongoing questions about authority, expertise, ownership, and custodianship.
The Assembly is conceived both as a setting and a mode of practice through which knowledge is collectively produced. As the first gathering in the Critical Conservation: Communities of Practice series, it invites participants to rethink conservation as a relational, pluricultural, and political practice.
The central question guiding the Assembly is: How do communities of practice reshape conservation when it is understood as a collective practice that sustains and transmits knowledge, gestures, values, and forms of communal life?
If you would like to learn more about the Assembly and/or participate, please consult our call for participation available here.