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Please note that you can sign up for pre-events only if you are already registered as a participant or a non-presenting participant and if you paid the registration fee.
Registration allows you to not only take part in the pre-events but also in the whole conference. Click here to register if you have not done so already.
Some pre-events require you to prepare ahead of time, so please await a detailed email with more information. Links to the meetings will also be sent to you in due time.
Please remember that all times and dates are given in Central European Time (CET).
All pre-events are free of charge for registered participants. The number of participants for most pre-events is limited, so we recommend that you register for them as soon as possible.
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If you have any questions about the conference, please contact us at conference@memorystudiesassociation.org.
If you have questions about a specific event, please contact its host.
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
Registration: https://msaconferencewarsaw.dryfta.com/attendee-registration-tickets
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.
