Abstracts Archive

While spatial organization of memories and their insertion into citiscapes was traditionally considered a product of the contemporary ideological framework and work of political elites, the ways and forms in which we bring memories back to the present significantly changed during the last decade. Me...

Ward Manor, an undergraduate dorm at Bard College located in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York is the setting for this multimodal and interdisciplinary ethnographic research which addresses underlying biases present in the creation of historical narratives developed by community memory. Drawing on the w...

Wroclaw is one of the largest urban centers of the Western and Northern Territories - areas attached to Poland in 1945. The politically imposed context of the birth of Wroclaw made it impossible for the next generations of inhabitants to get to know and understand the cultural landscape of the cit...

In the winter of 2018, millions of women filled the streets of Argentine cities to demand the legalization of abortion. For the first time, a bill constructed by activists over the course of almost four decades was to be heard in the chambers of the National Congress. The Senate rejected the law aft...

This paper examines the local memory practices of the Kurdish activists in Turkey within the critical transitional justice (TJ) theory. In recent years, mainstream TJ has been criticized because of its top-down and state-centric approach.TJ processes have sometimes failed to, at least, contribute to...

The contribution to British society and culture of the so-called 'Windrush' generation and their descendants has frequently been documented in literary texts, and canonical works by writers such as Sam Selvon and George Lamming address the issues surrounding migration from the Caribbean to the UK du...

The story of the brutal lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till is familiar to most Americans and its inclusion in narratives of the civil rights era is common. His death, and the acquittal of his killers, is remembered as a spark which helped ignite the Civil Rights Movement. It is commemorated as an e...

The dynamics of historical memory is a subject that increasingly attracts the interest of many African writers who turn to fiction, not only to illuminate the nexus of history, memory and the contradictions of constructing collective identities but also to highlight the role of various forms of spat...

The human species that gets up on both feet has begun to need less sense of smell and more sight. The fact that humans started to use their sense of sight to recognize their surroundings did not dull the sense of smell. On the contrary, it can be said that the sense of smell has become the carrier o...

Proclamations of leadership in gender equality have recently become a perhaps unlikely rallying call from far-right activists. Gender equality and women's rights have been adopted as a signifier of white western culture that must be protected against a threat from an external other. Concurrently...

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the memory of a "Polish woman" – in Hebrew: "ha-Polaniya" - in the collective memory of Israeli travelers with Polish origins, who recently started to visit Poland for a leisure tourism. By using the conception of a dynamic memory (Rigney 2008) and travellin...

This paper examines the (historical) narrative in German newspapers that ultimately shapes the Germans' image of the nation. Starting from the assumption that a nation is an "imagined political community" (Anderson, 1991), which is based on shared knowledge of traditions and historic identities, the...

In my presentation I would like to take a closer look on current narrations delivered by the Polish historical museums (the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk and the Warsaw Uprising Museum) and examine how their inclusiveness or exclusiveness of storytelling changes the visitor's perspective...

Despite the so-called 'turn toward the figure of the perpetrator in recent historical fiction' (Crownshaw 2011), contemporary trauma theory has paid little attention to the representation of perpetrator trauma in both literature and film. The discomfort of recognizing perpetrator trauma and the incl...

This paper presents the results of a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute spoken interaction between a research participant and a researcher. The talk in the interaction concerns the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oswiecim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and c...

Within  debates surrounding 'Levi's Paradox' – the idea that through their survival, survivors are not necessarily the 'complete witnesses' of the Holocaust  – the Muselmann is frequently posited as a figure able reconcile this conundrum. Within testimonial ...

This paper is part of a larger project, in which I intend to draw a more nuanced picture of the field of Polish-Jewish memory  in postcommunist Poland, and do so with the US audience's perspective in mind. I plan to shed light on the factors that have conditioned a range of developments in ...

In August 2014 President Vladimir Putin inaugurated a monument, erected on the Poklonnaya Gora Hill in Moscow and dedicated to Russian soldiers who fell during the First World War. Putin loudly declared that their victory was stolen from his country. According to his words, "it was stolen by those w...

"Marxist socialism is the deadliest ideology in history." This quote from the website of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) in Washington D.C., represents one of a growing number of controversial commemorative projects being pursued globally by representatives of conservatively-orien...

Dr. Till Hilmar, SOCIUM - Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy, Bremen University, Germany - till.hilmar@uni-bremen.deIn this presentation, I examine convergences between social memory and the study of economic inequality. To do so, I look specifically at wealth. Economist Thomas Piketty...

This paper will explore the convergences between silences and noise present in memorial narratives on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum Facebook page.Examining the gaps, or silences, in memorial narratives are an important part of their wider analysis; these absences can tell us just as much as that which ...

Over the last years a new medium for representing the Holocaust has appeared: digital reconstructions of concentration and extermination camps in virtual reality. Thus, the Italian developer 101% is working on the simulation “Witness: Auschwitz”, that will allow users to relive ‘everyday’ li...

En esta ponencia analizaré las prácticas y valores sociales que hicieron posible y legitimaron el terrorismo de estado durante la última dictadura argentina (1976-1983) a través de sus representaciones en la literatura y las artes visuales. Específicamente, examina...

This paper explores the convergences between 'popular' and 'populist' engagements with the past by critically investigating representations of World War II in Austria. Drawing on oral history interviews with members of the Austrian majority population, it asks how 'traditional' and 'popular' memory ...

For survivors of state violence memory is alive. The process of remembering is one that is embodied, nourished and injected with life for the violence and mechanisms of silence surrounding them are determined to bury, erase and render them invisible. What does it mean for memory to be alive? How is ...

In Italy there is a new interesting wave in historical museums, in particular about XXth Century.In the last few years, some new museums have been inaugurated, as M9 in Mestre-Venice; some others have been rearranged, as Museo del Risorgimento in Turin or Museo della guerra in Rovereto; and some oth...

The village of Catoctin Furnace lacks a collective memory that includes the African American workers (both enslaved and freed) who lived and worked at the village's iron furnace from the time of the Revolution until the mid 19th century. Now, the village historical society and partners are attemptin...