Abstracts Archive

In the early 2000s the economic boom, more commonly known as the Celtic Tiger, unleashed such euphoria and optimism that the depression of the previous decade, which had led political commentators to consider the Republic a "third world country" (Caherty), seemed now a matter of the past. Moreover, ...

In her project 'Under-Writing - Beirut', the Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige approaches Lebanon's capital city as a palimpsest. The media she employs include video, text, still images, and digital technology. The National Museum of Beirut is one of the sites she has chosen and entitled as ...

The memory of the World War II has an active role in the contemporary Croatian society, and especially of the conflict between Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH) founded by Ustasha movement and anti-fascist fighters led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Often heavily politicised, th...

Palestine/Israel is a textbook example of a conflict over historical narratives. Binary readings of the past pit Philistines and Israelites, Muslims and Jews, survivors of the Holocaust and the Nakba against one another. Many acknowledge the degree to which the past is securitized and weaponized in ...

The research I am going to present in my paper aims to investigate the issue of women's participation in the development of modern culture and arts, examining photographs made by women living in Lviv in 1930s, both professionals and amateurs. There are several dimensions in which the research will b...

Poland, ReexaminedIn memory studies, the category of 'second-generation' is well-established within the historiography of WW2. It encompasses the exploration of transgenerational trauma, broken narratives, commemoration and testimony as part of the legacy carried by those born to holoca...

In my paper I wish to examine a specific position of the Polish bystander of the Holocaust – the position of a voyeur. Recent literature focuses particularly on the concept of the bystanders, in Polish context especially, within the frame of the social and economic benefits derived from the Holoca...

Many scholars have pointed out the striking cultural and historical similarities between Poland and Ireland from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, resulting from the shared lack of sovereignty and the need to preserve an "imagined community" and reconstruct a cultural memory through lit...

"It is important to tell the little-known history of the town now, because soon there will be nothing left of it (…) We are fighting here for the last scrap of memory", the former mayor of Sosúa stated referring to the town's Jewish exile history. Today, Sosúa is a popular holiday destination in...

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...

As part of attempts to end more than half century of armed conflict, transitional justice and memory initiatives have proliferated in Colombia, providing recognition and redress to victims of violence. Yet, alongside the focus on victims, former insurgents in Colombia have also called for the inclus...

This paper discusses mediatized memories of the refugee presence in Portugal between 1933 and 1945 in conjunction with theoretical concerns regarding transcultural memory and memory transfer in the context of migratory phenomena. Due to its geographical location and its official politics of neutrali...

In 2020, Rwanda commemorated the 26th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi which resulted in the slaughter of over 800,000 people in approximately 100 days. A few literary texts in response to the horrors of 1994 have since been published yet relatively few by Rwandan authors. Gilbert Gator...

The Zapatista Movement in the South- East of Mexico is strongly characterized by their performative and bodily praxis of mediation of memory. This indigenous group upraised in 1994 against the neocolonial and neoliberal policy of the Mexican government, with a call for democracy, justice and freedo...

As David Leonard argued in his 2004 article "Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace," video games are not just games- they are "sophisticated vehicles inhabiting and disseminating specific ideologies." This project explores how 2019's Call of Duty: Modern ...

The phenomenon of polarization has received increased attention in recent years and, especially so, in the United States (see for example Iyengar et al., 2019). Spain has been pointed out lately as one of the countries with very high levels of increasing polarization, especially amongst the elites (...

The increase in the influence/"power" of symbolic structures of political memory, the aggravating risks of identity conflicts in internal and foreign policy are intensifying by new means of contemporary political communications. These processes in the social construction of national identity warrant...

On its more general level, by focusing on several post-Yugoslav feature movies, this paper examines the politics of post-socialism and post-socialist memory particularly concerning both the post-Yugoslav mnemonic landscape and the overall European cultural memory politics. Leaning foremostly on conc...

A photo album as a medium of memory has a long history. Its precursor was Amicorum Album, widespread in Europe since the sixteenth - a student book containing entries of friends and professors collected as a souvenir, before graduation. In addition to the written text, these albums contained initial...

While coming in contact with the remnants of German cultures after the forced disappearance of the previous inhabitants, the new settlers in Polish "Recovered Territories" after 1945 were trying to include the objects that were left into the space of their everyday practices and produce a coherent m...

The 'cursed soldiers', or post-war anti-communist resistance fighters, have become key figures in Polish memory politics after the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawidliwość, PiS) came to power in 2015. The exhumation of the remains of 'cursed soldiers' from numerous unm...

This paper explores the politicization of memory and commemoration surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia through an examination of the 1991-1995 Croatian War of Independence ("Homeland War" in Croatia) and the 1992-1993 Croat-Bosniak War.  These two conflicts represent the zenith of C...

In this paper, I examine the role of archives as spaces for democratizing memorial processes in societies affected by conflict. In Chantal Mouffe's vision for an agonistic democracy, dissent is institutionalized (2000). Thus, democracy becomes an ongoing conversation about how to cons...

On 16 April 2014, the Sewol Ferry capsized off the southwestern coast of South Korea, killing 304 passengers, including 250 high school students. After the disaster, images of mothers of the young victims dominated the news footage and social media-mothers sitting at Paengmok Harbor, waiting for th...

The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, among other oral post-Holocaust initiatives, seeks to give voice to and remember the experiences of Holocaust survivors. During the interviews, many of the survivors opt to read poems that they have written, citing the artistic potential of poetry in comm...

Coloniality – a power structure that is linked to the exploitation and unequal distribution of wealth – has a pivotal role in the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed on the racialised, non-European bodies. Whenever the concept is deployed, it is often reduced to the Imperia...

The proposed paper would deal with the ongoing Georgian-Russian conflict and how it is represented and cultivated in the Georgian national narrative. However, Russian interpretation of the same phenomena and events will be also illustrated and analyzed. Particularly, the presentation will focus on ...

If, as Rosi Braidotti suggests in Posthuman Knowledge (2019), transhumanist posthumanism privileges the ontological status of embodied (or disembodied) forms of the human-after-the-human, then critical posthumanism foregrounds epistemological questions stemming from such a critique, and the sentient...

Being on the periphery of a country's official memory culture tends to not be perceived positively. "Memory actors" often want "sites of memory" to be built in significant economic and transportation locations to not only highlight their importance, but to also magnify the structure's importance. In...

Memory constitutes an important part of how we view international partnerships. Past victories, defeats and joint endeavours contribute to a feeling of allegiance and friendship. Moreover, historical memory plays a role for the legitimation of international politics "because historical references ...