Abstracts Archive

In the late history of modernity, there have been at least two major events that have (un)expectedly converged, interrupting the triumphant march of modernist progress and development. The first event revolved around the socialist modernity project and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, embod...

How can the human-oriented category of a witness be reformulated so that it includes the non-human? Can the environment act as a witness to historical trauma? The questions of whether it is possible to comprehend the ways in which the earth's strata holds material substances of history and violence ...

This paper adapts Pierre Nora's (1989) notion of lieux de mémoire and develops the idea of lieux de futur, or sites of future. The paper uses the case of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, an NGO-run Arctic archive of the world's seed biodiversity (75% of which was lost in the 20th century alone), to...

The paper, drawing from reflections on convergences of environmental humanities and memory studies, examines commemorative affordances of forests planted as memorials, focusing on their materiality.Commemorations that engage organic substance refer predominantly to their semiotic aspects, associatin...

In this paper, we will show that collective memory work can help us recognize how we are always socialized not just to/by other humans but also to/by the rest of nature. Calling attention to personal memories in memory studies, as cognitive, emotional, and corporeal traces and sensations, such as pl...

Memory plays a critical role in understanding the effects of climate change, and collective memories of past climate events help in turning a community into an environmentally-responsible and eco-conscious one. There are emerging studies on how climate changes, either drastic or over a long period o...