Communicating Memory Matters: Next Steps in the Study of Media Remembering and Communicative Commemoration
Date: 16-17 September 2020
Place: University of Salzburg
Deadline: 01 March 2020
This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from various disciplines researching transnational dimensions of memory, subjectivity and identity formation, broadly defined. Exploring the social-political processes and identities that resist or transcend neat categorisations of the ‘local’, ‘national’ or ‘global’, this conference explores different modes of transnational memory and commemoration that shape identities such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, and sexuality. The conference seeks to refine conceptual and methodological issues surrounding transnational memories, forms of remembering, and identities through a discussion of contemporary and historical case studies from across the globe as well as theoretically focused contributions to the field. The conference will be relevant to sociologists, historians, literary critics, political scientists, and human geographers interested in the relationships between memory and mobility.
Conference Keynote Speakers
We are delighted to announce that our two keynote speakers will be:
Professor Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (University College London).
Professor Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Professor in Migration and Refugee Studies, and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit and Coordinator of UCL’s Refuge in a Moving World Research Network at UCL.
Professor Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University).
Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. She was born in Romania and educated at Brown University, where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees.
Call for Papers
The conference welcomes papers that address one or more of the following research topics:
- The expression of diasporic and exilic memory, subjectivity and identity, including remembrance of migratory processes, racism and discrimination, and responses to state policies such as detention, deportation, segregation, assimilation, and multiculturalism.
- Transnational remembrance practices including international collaboration initiatives, war memorials, graveyards, dark tourism, migration museums, digital archives, and material culture including movable and immovable cultural heritage.
- The role of exiles and diasporas in social movements and transitional justice; the individual or collective pursuit of justice, dignity, reparations, and reconciliation.
- Writing absence and loss, narratives and storytelling, oral histories, intergenerational modes of inscription, affective responses to past events in the present, community-based repositories of memories, reading and visual technologies.
- Transnational commemoration of identities beyond the ‘national’, including remembrance practices based on racial, religious, gender, and sexual identities.
Please submit your abstract of 300 words (max) by 28 FEBRUARY 2020 via the form below.
This event is proudly supported by The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, at the University of Cambridge, and the British Academy.
Organisers
Zeina Azmeh, Department of Sociology
Jessica Fernández de Lara Harada, Politics and International Studies (POLIS)
Rin Ushiyama, Department of Sociology
If you have any questions about submitting your paper or about the conference in general, please do not hesitate to contact us at memories.in.transit@gmail.com
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