We are delighted to invite you to the 2026 COMCOL Annual Members Meeting, which will take place online on November 13, 2026 at 16:00 CET in cooperation with Ramsey County Historical Society.

During this meeting, we will present a report on our activities for 2025-2026. We are also delighted to welcome a special guest speaker, Samba Yonga, Co-Founder of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia, with more details to be shared very soon. The agenda for the annual meeting and the Zoom link are provided below.

Annual Members Meeting 2026 Agenda: 

Duration: 90 minutes

1. Opening and Welcome Remarks by the Chair (5 min)
2. Keynote Presention from Samba Yonga, followed by Q&A (40 min)
3. Final members voting for change of committee acronym (10 min)
4. Annual Report of the COMCOL Board (15 min)
5. Members’ Voices: Open Forum for Suggestions and Discussion (15 min)
6. Closing Remarks (5 min)

When Classification Fragments Memory: Reconstructing Collections through Community Knowledge

Speaker
Samba Yonga, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia

Session description
Colonial museum classification systems did more than organise collections. They separated objects from their makers, their communities and the knowledge that gave them meaning. Samba Yonga’s talk examines how those systems fragmented cultural memory, and how community-centred interventions can restore the relationships between objects, histories and living knowledge systems. Drawing on her work in digital heritage, archival activation and cultural governance, Samba Yonga explores what it takes to reconstruct collections on terms set by the communities they come from.

About the speaker
Samba Yonga is a Zambian strategic communications executive and cultural institution leader working across cultural governance, digital heritage, decolonial practice and Africa–Europe cooperation. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia and Founder of Ku-Atenga Media. Her work spans multilateral communications, institutional transformation, archival activation, digital repatriation and ethical knowledge systems. In 2026, she co-created What the Record Forgot, winner of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Digital Humanity, and leads cultural governance for the African Memory Data Commons. She also leads the AWDF-supported Petrified Archive Reading Room, advancing feminist Indigenous knowledge activation and intergenerational transmission.

COMCOL Annual Members Meeting: 

Date: Friday, 13 November 2026

Time: 16:00–17:30 CET (Central European Time)

Venue: Online (Zoom)

 

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88455359722

Join and take notes https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88455359722?mynotes=on

Meeting chat link https://us02web.zoom.us/launch/jc/88455359722

Meeting ID: 884 5535 9722

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