Abstracts Archive

Malik Sajad's graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) "de-familiarises" the hegemonic story about the geopolitical conflict in South Asia (Sarkar 2018). By focusing on the experience of a child growing up in Kashmir and not-yet-remembered histories from the below, the narrative ...

The unveiling in 2014 of the African and Caribbean War Memorial at Brixton's Windrush Square in London conveyed a solemn message engraved on the stone: 'Remembering the Forgotten'. Most existing scholarly studies focus on the war commemoration in Anglophone settler societies and rarely pay attention...

The diasporic South Asian communities, particularly the Bangladeshis, are often overlooked in our understandings of the (post)colonial South Asian experience. To understand the dynamics of identity within the Bengali communities in the UK today, it's really important to understand what pasts get...

On July 18 1936, fascism staged a coup in Spain. As a result, the democratic government of the Second Republic is put to an end and a dictatorship is established. Violence and repression were constantly present throughout the almost forty years which it lasted. After the death of the dictator in 197...

Matter matters in the memory politics of post-conflict societies. Artefacts and affective personal objects reveal the tangible legacy of conflict, physically ground memory work and situate commemorations and actors. Pinning memories to a particular material object is a useful and long-known mnem...

My paper is based on the archive of photographs inherited from my grandfather, Sebastià Llop: positive slides depicting images of his family life between the 60's and the early 2000's in Catalonia that contain insight on the shifting ideas of family, collectivity and nation. My aim is to explore hi...

1989 in Poland marked a profound change of the importance of the parliament. After the peaceful revolution, the parliament became once again the main legislative institution in the political system. However, the perception of the politics of memory in public opinion has been long constituted around ...

In the last 20 years, more than 35 memorial museums of emigration have been inaugurated in Italy, including a «national» one. This growth has gone together with a marked increase in a variety of memorialization practices involving the topic. This new attention to past emigration, however, has resu...

It is striking that the series of Black Lives Matter protests, triggered in early summer 2020 by the murder of George Floyd, quickly turned to targeting public forms of commemoration. Statues of problematic figures of esteem where roundly assailed across the US, in the UK and in Europe. The phenomen...

The Assam Agitation was a six-year long movement (1979-85) led by a students' organization that had far-reaching social and political implications in Assam. The main goal of the movement was a demand to stop the illegal immigration of foreign nationals to Assam mainly from the neighbouring count...

The notions of 'transgender' and 'sexual diversity' have become dominant symbolic resources at a global level as they encompass a diversity of dissident sex-gender experiences. These notions have been important as they include and synthesize a multiplicity of demands, social movements and cultural t...

The Peruvian Internal Armed conflict between the Shining Path, a militant group that attempted to dismantle society by using paramilitary techniques, and the State resulted in approximately 75,000 deaths, forced disappearances, more than half a million displaced people, racial profiling, and the use...

The EU's 'Eastern enlargement' has not ended the historical exceptionality of Western Europe's wealth and power. EU member states might be part of the same union, still there is a general divide in the lived socioeconomic realities of people with a 'capitalist' and 'socialist' past. The fact that th...

The identity construction and heritage making of postcolonial cities are mainly about dealing with the difficult and sometimes conflicting memories related to their colonial pasts, which are largely determined by the interaction between the colonised and colonisers, both during the colonial period a...

Material objects can function as carriers of social knowledge, specific values, or memories of past violence. With their unique feature of being haptic, they convey direct experiences and impressions of permanence. The active use and the physical presence of material objects can perpetuate feelings ...

After independence in 1947 and the turn towards a secular India, Coronation Park became a monument graveyard. Colonial era statues across the city were dumped at the North Delhi park, where they remain to this day. Now, the park is actively used for recreation by residents of North Delhi while the m...

Conflicts always have a grave impact on the people who suffer them. When we study the history of India, we see the impact that partition of India and Pakistan had had on the common people. There is a deep need of telling the tale of the sufferings, an intense urge to open the windows of memory and e...

"I had this grand idea, that I still have, that the United States was a country where people were treated well if they were seeking asylum, and that they gave it to you," a young woman named Valeria explained during a recent oral history interview. "But I didn't know that applying for asylum would b...

Museums traditionally are serving for the societies as regulators of what to remember and what to forget. In recent decades a transition from collections and objects to the memories and narratives in the museum world became more and more apparent and the focus has shifted to multiple representations...

Canada is a federal state composed of 13 provinces and territories. Moreover, its population is diverse: first occupied by Aboriginals, its territory was colonized by France then by Great Britain. This historical process led to two main minority communities, English speakers in the province of Quebe...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacies of Cuba's 1959 Revolution and its promised utopia fell under renewed scrutiny. During its post-Cold War "Special Period in Times of Peace" in the 1990s, the island was thrust into a climate of scarcity that demanded its inhabitan...

The presentation discusses the process of establishing a symbolic definition of contemporary Polish statehood in the post-1989 official memory. Based on the analysis of the memory struggle over the National Independence Day – one that occurred in the Polish parliament in the late 1990s – the pre...