The Company We Keep: Navigating Borders, Boundaries and Brands

The 2026 Conference on Business Archives, titled “The Company We Keep: Navigating Borders, Boundaries and Brands,” will be hosted in Brussels as a collaborative initiative between organizations from Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

​This conference gathers leading professionals to explore the evolving landscape of corporate memory in a complex, globalized environment. In a world where companies constantly change in structure and in ownership, the history and stories they hold - and how they keep them - have never been more important. This conference dives into the fascinating potential of corporate memory.

The Steering Committee of the Section on Business Archives is calling for papers, which explore the above outline through four distinct themes, which all represent a particular facet of the companies we keep:​

Theme 1 - Layers and legacies. Keeping corporate memory in a fragmented, globalized world of subsidiaries, spin-offs, mergers and divestitures.

Theme 2 - Connections and cooperation across international, cultural or brand divides through company collections and business archives.

Theme 3 - Conflicted custodians, dealing with sensitive histories in corporate collections.

Theme 4 - Show and tell. Share projects, outputs, collaborations and cases that inspire and spark enthusiasm in 7 minutes or less.

Please send the abstract for your paper to info@icasba2026.com by February 28th, 2026