Category Archives for Conference

NatSCA Digital Digest – October 2025

Compiled by Milo Phillips, Digitisation Co-ordinator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Welcome to the October edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

GCG Winter Seminar in Hastings – Registration Open Now

While the call for abstracts has now closed, you can still register to join the Geological Collections Group in December at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery for their 2025 Winter Seminar and Annual General Meeting. The Seminar and AGM will be held at the Museum on December 10th and will be followed by a field trip to the coast in the Pett Level – Fairlight area on December 11th.

For registration forms and details about the talks of the day, guidance on what to expect during the field trip, and directions for finding your ways to all of the above, visit their website here.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – September 2025

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Welcome to the September edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

Call for Papers – GCG special issue of Geological Curator.

This is reminder of the upcoming GCG special issue of Geological Curator. This issue will be published in Spring 2026, titled ‘Moving towards equitable Geoscience Collections’.

The purpose of this issue is to consolidate current research and initiatives that aim to improve the environment, accessibility, and future of geological collections. Broad themes welcomed in this issue include anti-colonial practice, physical accessibility, neuroinclusive practice, and representation of minority groups. Submissions can include topics relating to museums broadly, but submissions with a Geoscience collections focus would be preferred.

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Seeing With Their Eyes A Poetic Reflection on the 2025 ‘From Collections to Connections’ NatSCA Conference Presentation

Written by Pauline Rutter – Independent Archival Artist, Community and Organisation Poet.

These words look out from the page with eyes I have borrowed. Eyes not shaped for vision through the specific disciplinary scientific lens. Eyes that strain to see beyond past centuries of debate on what, of all origins, is knowable and what is not. With these original eyes, would ways of seeing allow the light to travel outwards resisting funnelled perspectives and interpretations descended from imperialistic systems of Enlightenment science, colonial ideologies and narratives? In this context my eyes had opened up unevolved or re-evolved with lepidopteran vision, though not removed from all that had been taught to be seen. New eyes with sight of intensified colour that amplified nature’s interconnecting patterns, only visible outside the spectrum of the everyday, the expected, the predetermined. 

What use is butterfly sight that transforms configured objects and living matter with or without full binominal species names, into fragments like those of the intertwined and metamorphosed elements in ritualistic rapture spreading out across a Wangechi Mutu collage? 

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NatSCA Digital Digest – June 2025

Compiled by Olivia Beavers, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at World Museum, National Museums Liverpool.

Welcome to the June edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

NatSCA Annual Conference & AGM 2025 Recording 

On May 8th and 9th 2025, NatSCA hosted ‘Making a Difference: Showing the Positive Impact of Natural History Collections’, the 2025 NatSCA Conference at the Manchester Museum. This conference was recorded and can now be viewed online on our YouTube channel here.

Society for the History of Natural History Summer Meeting 2025 – online registration open

The SHNH are offering an online attendance option for this year’s summer meeting, ‘A Sense of Nature’ on 19th and 20th June 2025. Registration for in-person attendance has now closed.

The conference will explore the intersections of the senses – including sight (vision), sound (hearing), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation) and touch (tactile perception) – with the history of natural history. The programme will feature 12 papers across six sessions.

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NatSCA Digital Digest – May 2025

Compiled by Ellie Clark, Collections Moves Team Leader at the Natural History Museum, London.

Welcome to the May edition of NatSCA Digital Digest

Digital Digest is a monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences, and training opportunities. We are keen to hear from you if you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest, please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

Registration Now Open for SHNH International Summer Meeting

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the two-day international meeting ‘A Sense of Nature’. The conference will explore the intersections of the senses – including sight (vision), sound (hearing), smell (olfaction), taste (gustation) and touch (tactile perception) – with the history of natural history.

The event will be at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow on 19th June and 20th June 2025. The conference will feature 12 papers across six sessions, as well as collections tours and an optional conference dinner.

Full details are available here. Registration will close at 6pm (BST) on 28th of May 2025.

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