This paper explores the potential of the university museum as a place for creativity and collaboration and for sharing ideas and practice. Projects and public engagement initiatives generated by university museums have the potential to both enrich our professional practice and to inform our public programmes, exhibitions and displays. University museums collaborate with a wide range of researchers but also reach outside of the academy to encourage participation from as wide a public as possible. Through this work we explore how the development of visual literacy, and creative and collaborative approaches to interpretation, can enable new and different ways of seeing and understanding our collections. Our research is interdisciplinary and committed to understanding and sharing different voices, experiences, and perspectives from within the museum, university and wider community, including advocating the need for institutions to embrace the need for public scholarship. However, does the message from university museums really gets across to touch and impact the lives of our wider audiences? This paper, drawing on two of the conference thematizes (University Museums and interdisciplinarity & Innovative and participatory approaches towards society) as well as background work conducted as part of the Fitzwilliam’s material cultures in public engagement project (https://beta.fitz.ms/research/projects/material-cultures-in-public-engagement) will be exploring strategies on how museums and communities can work better together to bring about change. In particular, we will attempt to answer the following questions:

How can research within the university and university museum can help us to develop our practice by challenging the assumptions we hold about how our visitors experience the museum?

How might we interrogate and challenge some of the hierarchies within the museum, university, and broader society through more participatory approaches to research?

How can collaborative approaches to research enrich and extend our understanding of the cultural value of museum buildings, displays and programming?