• Practical / Ethical COVID-19 Intersections of Memory

• Historical Intersections of Memory

• Political Discursive Intersections of Memory

• Institutional Intersections of Memory

• Biological / Ecological Intersections of Memory

• Disciplinary Intersections of Memory
  
  

We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations. Each paper will be discussed by a senior respondent. Please submit your application (an abstract of between 200 and 300 words, and a short bio) via this Google Form no later than 15 May 2021. You may only submit one application for this edition of MSA Forward. 

Once your paper is accepted, all presenters will be required to register, pay a workshop fee (€ 25) and to become members of MSA. For more information about the membership fees and waivers please visit: memorystudiesassociation.org. Paying for the workshop fee will allow the participants to also take part in other conference events (presentations, workshops, masterclasses, keynote lectures etc.).

JUNE 21, MONDAY

Bridging Memory Studies across Languages

A Workshop for Interpretation and Language Students

Host: PoSoCoMeS

Date: June 21, Monday 
Time: 4 pm CET
Duration: 120 min

Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZhLOYlM6RPOnz-XlD3kfQw

Contact: Mischa Gabowitsch (mischa.gabowitsch [at] einsteinforum.de) and Lana Lovrenčić (lovrencicl [at] gmail.com)

This workshop aims to sensitize interpretation and language students to some of the challenges involved in translating key concepts in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies between different languages, and to allow them to practice some of the skills required to interpret academic discussions and presentations in this field.

It will serve to prepare our online plenary session at the MSA conference (Monday, 5 July, 3-5 pm Central European Time) where scholars and practitioners from different disciplinary and linguistic backgrounds will discuss the challenges of doing memory studies in different languages. Most of the plenary session participants will also take place in the preparatory workshop.

During the workshop, participants will exchange ideas and discuss specific examples of translation difficulties. Part of the workshop will consist of interpretation practice for students (from English into any other language, though other language combinations with Arabic, Croatian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian are also possible), followed by a feedback session.

The workshop is free and open to all after registration (please use the link above). Students interested in practicing their interpretation skills at the workshop and the subsequent plenary session and receiving feedback from experts are encouraged to contact the organisers in advance, stating their language combination and background in memory studies (if any). PoSoCoMeS will issue a participation certificate to students who serve as interpreters during the workshop and the plenary session.
To register for this workshop please go to: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZhLOYlM6RPOnz-XlD3kfQw

JULY 1, THURSDAY

Host: MSA RG South-East Europe

Speakers: Nikolina Zidek (moderator), Ana Milosevic, Tamara Trost, Ana Ljubojevic, Astrea Pejovic, Vjeran Pavlakovic, Naum Trajanovski, Gruia Badescu

Date: July 1, Thursday

Time: 6 pm CET

Duration: 120 min

Contact: nizidek@gmail.com; trajanovskinaum@gmail.com

Number of participants: unlimited
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

Memory studies in South East Europe is an ever-growing research field. Most recently, several publications went beyond the "traditional" theoretical and methodological positions and thus widened the research scope of the memory studies on the region. This event will bring some of the editors and the researchers involved in these projects together to discuss the major findings, challenges, and impacts of the global pandemic on memory politics in Southeastern Europe and beyond:

- Framing the Nation and Collective Identities: Political Rituals and Cultural Memory of the Twentieth-Century Traumas in Croatia (2019), edited by Vjeran Pavlaković and Davor Pauković, analyzes top-down and bottom-up strategies of framing the nation through commemorative practices relating to events from the Second World War and the Croatian War of Independence.

- Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Former Yugoslavia (2020), edited by Ana Milošević and Tamara Pavasović Trošt, explores the various manners in which the European integration process has influenced the collective memory in the former-Yugoslav countries.

- Cultures and Politics of Remembrance in Southeastern Europe: Nationalism, Transnationalism and Cooperation, builds upon the transnational turn in the memory studies and provides a number of chapters that apply this concept in the regional context (oftentimes vis-à-vis what was identified as a nationalistic turn in the regional memory politics). 

- Memory Politics and Populism in Southeastern Europe (2021) explores the politics of memory in the region in the context of rising populism and their hegemonic grip on official memory and politics. 

- Changing Memoryscapes in Southeastern Europe (2021), which is to be published by Contemporary Southeastern Europe, aims at combining wide-range theoretical and methodological approaches within memory studies and thus bringing new perspectives of the grassroot memories in the city, bridging the gap in both analysis of bottom-up initiatives in the region, and using notions of space and place as analytical research tools.
- Synchronous Pasts: Transforming heritage in the former Yugoslavia (2021) co-edited by Gruia Badescu, Britt Baillie and Francesco Mazzucchelli. This collection scrutinizes the role of heritage in 'conflict-time', inquires what role the past might have in creating new identities at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, and investigates the dynamics of heritage as a process.

This event does not require any previous preparation.
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about the event in due time. 

Memory Studies and Theatre: Bridging Research and Art

Host: MnemoZIN

MnemoZIN is a research collective (Zsuzsa Millei (Tampere University, Finland), Iveta Silova (Arizona State University, USA), and Nelli Piattoeva (Tampere University, Finland)). MnemoZIN leads the Recollect / Reconnect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoodsproject and is part of the PoSoCoMeS MSA Working Group. 

Invited guests:

Playwriter, Director and Performer Tamás Ördög – Dollardaddy's Theatre Group

Playwriter and Dramaturg: Bence Bíró

Date: July 1, Thursday

Time: 6 pm CET

Duration: 60 min 

Contact:  zsuzsa.millei@tuni.fi

Number of participants: unlimited
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

Reconnect / Recollect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods is a collaborative, international, and interdisciplinary project seeking to create a dialogue among people divided by multiple borders – geopolitical, economic, generational, and cultural – inherited from and reordered after the Cold War. Bridging academic research and art, the project (re)collects memories of diverse childhood experiences during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, bringing into public view alternative and multiple personal histories that have the potential to transfigure divisions into connections. The project uses the method of collective biography and art for remembering, writing, working with, and representing childhood memories.

This workshop tells the story of the creative creation of the play 'KELET/EAST' inspired by childhood memories. The play premiered two full houses in Trafó House of Contemporary Art on September 22-23, 2020 in Budapest, Hungary written and performed by Dollardaddy's theater group. The play is scheduled to be performed regularly in Hungary, Finland, and the USA, but performances are being canceled due to the pandemic situation.

We show a 20-minute-long preview of the play followed by a discussion with the artists and researchers about how research and art can work together to bring social research to broader and public audiences in "promoting reflection, building empathetic connections, forming coalitions, challenging stereotypes, and fostering social action" (Leavy, 2020, p. 205).

This event does not require any previous preparation.
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about the event in due time.

Roundtable: Performance as a lens in memory studies

Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83036474516?pwd=ZmZrekNYOEE3M0pUbk0yZmgwbHBEUT09

Meeting ID: 830 3647 4516 

Passcode: 689111

Host: The Performance and Memory Working Group (Carmen Levick, Martina Karels, Clare Parfitt) 

The Performance and Memory Working Group explores memory through the lens of performance, considered as both a research methodology and a practice. We are concerned both with cultural production that is framed as 'performance' (theatre, dance, music, etc.) and with a wider range of memory practices (monuments and sites, photographs, social media, protest, etc.) that might productively be framed as 'performed' or 'performative'. 

Date: July 1, Thursday

Start: 6 pm CEST [5 pm London time]

Duration: 60 min

Contact: c.parfitt@chi.ac.uk

Number of participants: 30
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

In this roundtable chat, the three co-chairs of the Performance and Memory working group will share the different ways they use performance as a lens in their memory studies research. We will consider questions such as: 

• What does it mean to perform memory? 

• How is memory performed both inside and outside events culturally framed as 'theatre'? 

• Can performance be considered a methodology in memory studies? 

We welcome to the event anyone who wants to explore this fruitful perspective in memory studies.

This event does not require any previous preparation.
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about the event in due time.

JULY 2, FRIDAY

Collective biography: The method and memorywork. Part 1(2)

Host: MnemoZIN

MnemoZIN is a research collective (Zsuzsa Millei (Tampere University, Finland), Iveta Silova (Arizona State University, USA) and Nelli Piattoeva (Tampere University, Finland)). MnemoZIN leads the Recollect / Reconnect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods project and is part of the PoSoCoMeS MSA Working Group.  

Date: 2 July, Friday

Start: 5 pm CET 

Duration: 60 min

Contact: Zsuzsa.Millei@tuni.fi 

Number of participants: unlimited
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

In the first part of this workshop, we give an introduction to the Collective Biography (CB) method (Davies & Gannon, 2006) and how we have retooled it for memory research in relation to our project Memories of Everyday Childhoods. Despite its name, CB examines micro-moments of subjectification, discursive effects, relational, affective and material entanglements revealing how individuals and groups subjectively engage with reality and, crucially, their own role in it together with others, human and non-human. In small groups, collectively recalling these events, this type of memorywork moves experience into narrative vignettes enriched with embodied and emotional aspects of memories that might come to light during groupwork. In this process, similar to the autoethnographic genre, the roles of the researcher and the researched are collapsed, and the aim is to understand subjectification collectively, for example, to societal norms, discourses or ideals. We also elaborate the approach's pragmatic utilization, affordances and challenges, and potentials for memory research.

This event does not require any previous preparation.
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about the event in due time.

Collective biography: The method and memorywork. Part 2(2)

Host: MnemoZIN

MnemoZIN is a research collective (Zsuzsa Millei (Tampere University, Finland), Iveta Silova (Arizona State University, USA) and Nelli Piattoeva (Tampere University, Finland)). MnemoZIN leads the Recollect / Reconnect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods project and is part of the PoSoCoMeS MSA Working Group. 

Date: 2 July, Friday

Start: 6 pm CET 

Duration: 120 min

Contact: Zsuzsa.Millei@tuni.fi 

Number of participants: 20 participants
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

In the second part of the workshop, we conduct a Collective Biography Memory Workshop in relation to the conference theme: Biological / Ecological Convergences. Please bring to the workshop a childhood memory that resonates with the theme: NATURE. For example, bring a childhood memory about playing or collecting berries or mushrooms in the forest, an event during your holiday in nature, a moment of working on the land, an experience during the excursion to a national park etc. Focus on the short episode and describe the event in as much detail as possible, including even what might be considered to be trivial or inconsequential. Who is there with you (including the more-than-human)? Where are you / describe the surroundings, lights, sounds, trees etc.? How does it feel being there and with others? What sensations do you have in your body? What is the discussion about? Try not to self-censor the memory and share everything that exists in the remembered scene. Only bring a memory that you are happy to share. Limit the length of your memory to about one type-written page (one and a half spaces between lines). If you wish, prepare to show objects, photos and/or artwork/s that are connected to the theme and memories (even if it is not your artwork but you have seen it somewhere and resonates with the memory).

This workshop requires preparation from the participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information in due time. 

Methodological challenges of memory 

Host: Jenny Wüstenberg

Jenny Wüstenberg is an Associate Professor of Twentieth Century History at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Her research focuses on memory activism, as well as on transnational and relational perspectives on memory politics. She is the co-founder and current co-president of the Memory Studies Association.

Date: July 2, Friday

Start: 3 pm CET

Duration: 180 min

Contact: jenny.wustenberg@ntu.ac.uk 

Number of participants: 25
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

Conducting empirical research under current conditions is challenging in any field, but it may be especially difficult for memory scholarship that is so deeply reliant on understanding relationships with people and places.

This event seeks to provide space to collaboratively address some of the common – and specific – methodological problems we are facing. It will feature short talks by experienced researchers: 

- Ruramisai Charumbira,

- Rebecca Dolgoy, 

- Sarah Gensburger, 

- Thomas van de Putte, 

- Orli Fridman 

- and Emily Keightley

...as well as the time to tackle particular issues in small groups. The workshop will end with a reflective plenary session. Overall, the goal of the workshop is to reduce the feeling of isolation during research that many of us are experiencing.

To prepare for the workshop each participant will be required to: 

1. Submit ahead of time a "project brief" (no more than one page long) outlining:

- The research question and a brief description of the project, including what type of research it is (MA/Ph.D. project, journal article, fifth book, long-term passion project...).

- A description of the research design you are using or considering (or multiple options). 

- The methodological (nota bene: not purely theoretical) challenge you would like the group to discuss with you.

2. Read the "project briefs" of other group members.

This workshop requires preparation from the participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information in due time. 

Artist's Book: visual essay?

Host: Mirta Kupferminc

Mirta Kupferminc is a multidisciplinary Argentine artist, a curator, a lecturer, a mentor and a teacher, who lives and works in Buenos Aires. Some of the recurring themes in her art are identity, literature, migration, human rights, and memory. She uses her Jewish heritage to extract from the culture a series of metaphors that go beyond an individual experience.

Date: June 23, Wednesday (part I), July 2, Friday (part II)

Start: 3 pm CET (part I), 2 pm CET (part II)

Duration: 60 min (part I), 120 min (part II)

Contact: mirta@mirtakupferminc.net 

Number of participants: 12
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

This workshop is an invitation to rethink an idea and to develop a concept or a message in a visual language. Scholars focusing on memory studies are used to interpreting photographs or archival documents through their individual experiences. But how many other things can we communicate, if we combine the traditional approach with different artistic techniques? How many new paths can we open to the observers-readers? Can we give access to their own feelings and thoughts without formulating a thesis with words?

We can speak with images, with silences, altering the usual order of the words, or even using them as graphics. We can hold a broken old book in our hands and redefine it by adding to it, embroidering on it new images or lines.

This workshop requires preparation from the participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information in due time. 

Inside the black box of cultural memory

Host: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska

Magdalena Sayrusz-Wolska works as a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw, she is a member of the Memory Studies Association's Executive Committee. Her research fields are cultural memories in Poland and Germany, reception studies, visual history.

Date: July 2, Friday

Start: 3 pm CET

Duration: 120 min

Contact: saryusz-wolska@dhi.waw.pl

Number of participants: 15
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

Cultural memory studies are dominated by political, aesthetical, and ethical approaches. We often study cultural representations of the past without asking how exactly they were produced. Although most of us precisely identify the inputs (i.e. events to be commemorated) and outputs (i.e. representations of the past) of cultural memories, the networks behind them remain under-researched. While many of the recent works in our discipline emphasize the role of the human actors, i.e. politicians, NGOs, or audiences, the non-human actants that contribute to cultural memories often remain invisible. 

The workshop aims at discussing the materiality of cultural memories with a special focus on the agency of technology. In particular, we will examine how the theoretical ideas deriving from infrastructure studies may contribute to memory studies. Our main focus will be on the text "How to infrastructure" by Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker (2002), which the participants will receive prior to the workshop. Apart from reading the text, the participants should prepare short (max. two minutes, one slide) presentations of their current research emphasizing the issues of technologies and infrastructures of memory.  

This workshop requires preparation from participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time. 

JULY 2, FRIDAY

Memory and storytelling: examining fiction as a medium of re-membering and forgetting 

Host: Avishek Parui

Avishek Parui works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. His areas of research include memory tropes in literature, modernism, masculinity studies, and posthumanism. He is a member of the Memory Studies Association.

Date: July 2, Friday

Start: 3 pm CET

Duration: 90 min

Contact: avishekparui@iitm.ac.in 

Number of participants: 20
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

This session will map how literature operates as a medium where the relationship between remembering and forgetting is foregrounded through acts of encoding and effacement. We will examine this matter both at the micro/motor level and the macro/discursive level. During this masterclass, we will research the experiences and concepts of cognition and consumption of individuals, events, and their re-tellings. This will be done by flagging up the narrative networks which inform the production and preservation of the human self, embedded in cultural codes, as well as material markers.

Three texts namely 'The Fly' by Katherine Mansfield, 'Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather' by Gao Xingijan, and 'A Christmas Memory' by Truman Capote will be used to demonstrate the methodology and its framing in this re-reading and re-construction of private and public memories through fiction.

This masterclass does not require any previous preparation. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time.

Working transmedially: a semiotic approach

Host: Daniele Salerno (with Marit van de Warenburg)

Daniele Salerno is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.  In collaboration with the University of Buenos Aires, he currently works on cultural Memory and LGBT Activism. He is an associate member of the ERC project team "Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe" (ReAct) at Utrecht University.

Marit van de Warenburg was an intern for the ReAct project. She is currently writing a research master's thesis on protest music and memory.

Date: July 2, Friday

Start: 3 pm CET

Duration: 90 min

Contact: d.salerno@uu.nl

Number of participants: 20
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

This masterclass will deal with the analysis of corpora that bring together different media (e.g. TV, the digital, the internet), substances (e.g. orality, visual, writing, aural), discursive genres, and formats (e.g. songs, slogans, video clip). In particular, we will work on conceptual categories and analytical tools coming from the semiotics of culture and narratology. We will tailor a methodological toolbox for tracking the different semiotic forms which cultural memories assume in their circulation, remediation, and cross-referencing. Drawing on one of the results of the project Remembering Activism – ReAct (Utrecht University, project leader Ann Rigney), we will take the Italian anti-fascist song Bella ciao as a methodological case study, tracking its remediations and global circulation across different media and social movements.

This masterclass does not require any previous preparation.
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time. 

JULY 5, MONDAY

Remembering Painful Past: A Virtual Reality Application for Visitors of the National Mall in Washington, DC

Host: Tim Gruenewald

Tim Gruenewald is an Assistant Professor of American Studies. He researches and teaches at the University of Hong Kong, where he directs the American Studies Programme. He is the author of Curating America's Painful Past (2021) and the director of the documentary feature Sacred Ground (2015) about Mount Rushmore and Wounded Knee.

Date: July 5, Monday

Start: 10 am CET

Duration: 60 min

Contact: tgruene@hku.hk

Number of participants: 30
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

This workshop introduces a knowledge exchange project currently under development at The University of Hong Kong.

On May 25, 2020, four police officers killed George Floyd on a street in Minneapolis during an arrest. Onlookers captured the event on their cell phones. The horrific videos caused mass declarations that Black Lives Matter in protests that spanned the United States and quickly spread around the world. It brought audiences back to confront inequality in the present that is rooted in the past, and many called, once again, for a fundamental reevaluation of memory in the United States.

In response, this project creates a mobile geolocation application about painful history on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Using augmented virtual reality, the application makes available site specific national and local history to visitors, such as the use of slave labor during the construction of iconic buildings (e.g. White House, United States Capitol) or the displacement and decimation of indigenous nations in the Chesapeake Bay area. The workshop will discuss the scope of the project and introduce some of the technologies employed.

This masterclass does not require any preparation from participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time. 

Listening for object memories: cultivating attunement

Host: Linda Lapiņa

Linda Lapiņa is a researcher, a dancer, and a psychologist. She works as an Assistant Professor of Cultural Encounters at Roskilde University in Denmark. This masterclass builds on her research on affective methodologies, movement as a form of listening and more-than-human embodied memory.

Date: July 5, Monday

Start: 10 am CET

Duration: 180 min

Contact: llapina@ruc.dk 

Number of participants: 10
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

This interactive workshop will explore ways of engaging with object memories, and the potential these methods hold for memory studies. On one hand, material objects act as triggers to access human memories across ruptures of time and space - including intergenerational and transnational memories. On the other hand, things also have a being and a memory 'of their own', which we can try to listen to through affective, embodied engagement. 

In this masterclass, we will explore both ways of interacting with objects. Can things 'speak' to us, and if yes, how can we become better at listening and attuning ourselves to hear them? How can we resonate with them, tapping into their atmospheres, affective loads, and their knowledge? How can we work towards a 'thing theory' through listening to object memories?

The workshop will be playful and explorative rather than instrumental in its approach, but I also welcome participants working with specific research projects that involve object memories.

This masterclass does not require any previous preparation. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time. 

Monuments, murals, and minefields: a masterclass on researching sites of memory

Host: Vjeran Pavlakovic

Vjeran Pavlakovic is an assistant professor and a Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He has written numerous articles on the topics of Yugoslavs in the Spanish Civil War, the politics of memory, and transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia.

Date: July 5, Monday

Start: 10 am CET

Duration: 90 min

Contact: vjeranp@gmail.com

Number of participants: 25

This masterclass provides participants with "tricks of the trade" on researching sites of memory based on over 15 years of fieldwork in Europe and the United States. The course will cover various aspects of finding memorial sites, recording and studying them, engaging in ethnographic fieldwork, reflecting on potential ethical issues, and discussing what to do with the material once the fieldwork is completed. Various case studies, drawn primarily from Southeastern Europe, and projects using digital humanities tools will help to illustrate the themes of the masterclass. Both new researchers interested in studying memory sites as well as experienced scholars willing to share their stories are encouraged to participate in this virtual monument hunt.

This masterclass does not require any previous preparation. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time. 

The impact of changing time concepts on memory (studies)

Host: Johanna Vollmeyer

Johanna Vollmeyer is a research associate at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her publications deal largely with memory and its relation to time, trauma, power, and violence, as well as constructions of identity and alterity in contemporary German (and Spanish) literature. She is a member of the Memory Studies Association's Advisory Board.

Date: July 5, Monday

Start: 10 am CET

Duration: 90 min

Contact: johvollm@ucm.es

Number of participants: 15
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

Our world is characterized by an increasing entanglement of the analog with the digital. Particularly since the massive use of smartphones (as of 2004), this interlacing is having an unprecedented impact in our everyday lives. We can access information instantly, anytime, anywhere, thanks to ever-faster technologies. This has irrevocable consequences for how we perceive time and space, and eventually affects the creation of memory in an equal manner.

This masterclass aims to explore different time concepts that are based on proposals from cultural studies as well as closely linked to insights from natural sciences. The concept of time from natural sciences provides a valuable foundation for analyses in memory studies, where time can be considered the foundational basis for creating and analyzing memory. However, the time concepts used in many case studies and also in theoretical approaches in the field remain frequently undiscussed and undefined. The rapid datafication and digitalization of our world urges us to scrutinize how time and memory are created against traditional concepts of time.

This masterclass requires preparation from the participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time. 

Memory Objects: mnemonic affordance beyond the human

Host: Magdalena Zolkos

Magdalena Zolkos is a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She is a political theorist, working across the fields of politics, philosophy, and literature, and specializing in memory politics, heritage restitution, memory, and material objects, trauma theory, and testimony.

Date: July 5, Monday

Start: 10 am CET

Duration: 180 min

Contact: zolkos@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Number of participants: 30
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets

This masterclass focuses on the study of human-object relations and interactions in social and collective memory. Through the application of cultural concepts of 'mnemonic affordance', 'non-human memory' and 'boundary objects', etc., we will investigate recent critical interventions into this field of inquiry.

We will focus on three contemporary philosophers from the European continental tradition, who help us think through questions of non-human mnemonic agency from different philosophical, epistemological and disciplinary angles: Bruno Latour, whose idea of Dingpolitik re-centers collective action around material things; Roberto Esposito, who critically probes the binary distinction between 'persons' and 'things' in Western law and culture; and Georges Didi-Huberman, who has taken a visual philosophical approach to inanimate and vegetal things as 'witnesses' of genocidal and violent history. We will undertake a close comparative reading of selected texts by these philosophers and elaborate their significance for researching mnemonic and testimonial affordances and potentialities of material objects in culture and politics. Finally, we will consider whether and how they contribute to the emergence of non-anthropocentric memory studies.

This masterclass requires preparation from participants. 
Registered participants will receive an email with detailed information about this event in due time.