Abstracts Archive

In 1992, the Hamburg-based Spar Handels AG supermarket chain announced the launch of a 1.3 million DM advertising and sales campaign dedicated to the products of the rapidly disappearing GDR. The "From the New German Lands" campaign (re)introduced grocery products from the communist period to store ...

When Mark Augé argues that oblivion is the "life force of memory and remembrance its product," his privileging of forgetting over recollection places ethnology along the lines of Pontalis, pushed for a hastened "working through" as central to his memory politics. Fictional...

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...

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is sometimes considered a "memory disorder." Traumatic events that have occurred in the past are often relived in nightmares and flashbacks as if it happens in the here and now, whereas patients find it hard to remember daily events in the present. Furthermore im...

Ever since the United States Institute of Peace published three-volume Transitional Justice in 1995, transitional justice has become a buzzword frequently heard on various occasions all over the globe when it comes to political transitions or regime changes. While political scientists and jurists ar...

This paper is concerned with what I would like to call provincial memory. A century ago Northern Ireland was established as a statelet (also commonly referred to as the Province) within the United Kingdom; meanwhile, in Upper Silesia, a Plebiscite was held to determine the national identifications ...

My research focuses on Jewish children rescued from Czechoslovakia to Great Britain by the Barbican Mission to the Jews in 1939. Some children came from families of mixed German-Jewish origin and experienced a double trauma - divorce and stigmatization due to German and Jewish nationality. They also...

The 1990s is a controversial period of the Russian history. On the one hand, it was the time of the freedom of speech and development of private business. On the other hand, this period is often associated with the narrative of the "likhie devianostye" (the hard nineteen-nineties) that portrays this...

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...

In my paper, I would like to tackle the problem of representation of Eastern Europe as a post-genocidal void in (mostly) Western Holocaust studies. For long, Western scholarship was not interested in this landscape and fates of those who were in fact the majority of the six million: the Ostjuden. I...

Participatory and socially inclusive initiatives in cultural heritage have created a new 'hybrid collective'. The GLAM sector witnesses joining forces for digital transformation on which many memory institutions have already embarked in order to cope with the ever-changing landscape of the new media...

Individual and collective memory are at the core of the emergence of graphic novels within the comics industry. Their capacity to show and tell, to make ethereal and subjective memories seen with the necessary sophistication to tackle their sociopolitical context, transformed this medium into a prom...

Which artistic forms of expression are characteristic of protests in contemporary Latin America? How are protests and resistance from the past remembered? How does this memory change over time? Which artistic resistance is being reactivated today? These questions will be answered regarding curr...

Through memory narratives of political activists of a specific generation born between 1974 and 1982 in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia in post-socialist transitional peripheries, we try to identify how an identity of an activist is being created in a given context. Can we call the generation of the la...

Simulating the perspective of children has always been an important memory tool in immersive and empathetic representations of past atrocities and violence in literature, film, fictional autobiography, and museums to achieve an emotional proximity between past and present. This paper will analyze ho...

Over the past decades, "memory activists" in Chile have constantly struggled to preserve the memory of those who had been brutally killed, tortured or made disappear during the Pinochet dictatorship. One of the latest form of memorialization has been the struggle by civil society sectors and victims...

The aim of this paper is to map out the manifold narrativisations and representations of the complex trauma – i.e. trauma of the victim, perpetrator and witness– in the film The Load (Teret, Ognjen Glavonic, 2018). The film researches the story hidden behind the discovery of the mass grave on t...

This paper analyzes how the 1948 Yiddish-Polish film Unzere Kinder directed by Natan Gross and Shaul Goskind anticipates much later debates of the 1980s and 1990s on how the Holocaust ought to be represented and how these representations might enable a healing from the trauma of the Holocaust for bo...

Among numerous studies on the politics of memory in post-communist countries, the problem of historians' involvement into the state politics of memory was yet poorly explored. It was shown in the previous research how authorities use expert status and professional skills of historians to legitim...

Violence begets violence. This paper explores disruptive colonial legacies in Northeast Asia. Genocidal ripples in the region refracted murder through multiple homicidal regimes, savage conflicts, and devastating humanitarian crises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Atrocity return...

This research examines how members of the third generation of Palestinians living in the diaspora construct their personal identities, given the competing demands between a familial Palestinian upbringing and daily life within the societies of their birth countries. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch's conc...

This paper will examine Applied Theatre as a form of public pedagogy for exploring the Shoah. It will focus on a project entitled "Triangulation", an aesthetic form of representation with which to explore contemporary resonances of the Holocaust. The materiality of the triangles that marked the Nazi...

The paper is aimed at presenting and discussing the theoretical (and metaphorical) concept of assemblage of memory inspired by and grounded in the creative work done in connection with social research within the framework of participatory theatre. Based on three projects of this kind that I collabor...

This paper presents a book project,Becoming Postcolonial, which  studies memoirs written after the dissolution of the British Empire to understand how people have narrated their lives and selves in the wake of dramatic transformations in public discourse. Just as decolonization challenged the p...

Lüju (lü opera) of Shandong province as the major regional operatic genre and folk tradition in contemporary China, has been transformed and reconstructed as cultural heritage, educational, and propaganda tools of the party-state, attractions of cultural tourism, and trigger of nostalgic desires o...

Children born of war (CBOW) are individuals whose one parent, usually the mother, was a member of the invaded (occupied) local community and one, usually the father, was one of the invaders, occupiers, simply enemies. For the purpose of my research carried out in Poland I have adopted a slightly bro...

Through the analysis of Nigeria's architecture as a landscape of repressed memories, this thesis advocates the reconstruction of Nigeria's conservation system by decolonising legislation and establishing a model grounded in local values, with an agenda to conserve cultural identity in architecture.Â...

Recently, all major history museums in Estonia – the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum as well as the Estonian Museum of Occupations and Freedom Vabamu have opened new permanent exhibitions containing innovative approaches to the 20th century past. While history museums (pa...

This interdisciplinary research will be the first investigation of the collective memory of the Halabja chemical attack on March 16, 1988, which led to the deaths of 5,000 people and the displacement of thousands more. In the section of literature using the theory of Maurice Halbwachs's collective m...

The last few years have seen a significant increase in both original and scientific publications on comics. In particular, comics are emerging as a new medium for the popular dissemination of history and memory, often intersecting the genre of docu-journalism. Precisely by this boom in attention fro...