Event overview
This 2-day symposium will bring early career researchers and established academics in conversation about themes of memory, space and violence. Our event programme, including information about full panel presentations, times and speakers will be up soon.
EVENT DESCRIPTION
What does it mean to remember through space? Why is it important, or indeed necessary, to analyze memory and space conjointly? Is it possible to remember without or outside of space? In this symposium, we will critically engage with the complex relationship between memory and space. In order to do this, we propose a series of panels that will theoretically expand upon the following three dimensions:
Marks on Space: The space we inhabit possesses material marks from the past. In the post-violence context, these spatial marks can refer to specific traumatic events or to the physical disappearance and erasure of things, persons, and traces. Do the material traces on particular spaces support, catalyze, or hinder processes of remembering?
Preserved Spaces: In some post-conflict contexts, past events may be deliberately preserved in space through processes of conservation or through the creation of monuments and memorials. This aspect of the memory-space relationship points to disputes over how to protect spaces that possess material marks from the past and over how to produce new memorial inscriptions onto spaces that are not linked to sites of violence. The memory-space relationship is important to consider when analyzing the construction and uses of spaces, like archives, designed specifically to conserve and preserve the “traces of the past”.
Relational Space: Lastly, there is the work of collective and individual memory that allows for the discovery of experiences in the present from other temporal and spatial locations. This analytic dimension enables us to put a special emphasis on the way memory processes are carried out in, through, and apropos space. How do people remember spatially? To what extent do memories correspond to the material realities of particular spaces? And in contrast, how does space affect the way individuals and collectivities remember the past? Furthermore, how are personal or individual memories of violence mediated by transnationally circulating memory narratives? How can victims’ narratives about the spaces where they experienced violence help us understand the larger mechanics of oppressive, exclusionary regimes?
P A N E L D E S C R I P T I O N S
Dwelling in and Imagining Violent Spaces
Invited Speaker: Yael Navaro-Yashin, University of Cambridge
Organizer: Pamela Colombo, CCHS-CSIC (Madrid, Spain)
This panel inspects the special features of dwelling in and imagining contemporary spaces of state violence through the perspective of the subjects that have been confined there. The “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities has provided a fundamental framework for developing critical approaches to space (Lefebvre 1974; Harvey 1990; Massey 2011). Also larger analytical framework has examined the relationship between processes of state violence and the reshaping of space (Gregory 2004; Weizman 2007). This panel seeks to discuss a less-analyzed issue: how space is lived in violent circumstances (Feldman 1991; Navaro-Yashin 2012). As researchers, we only have access to the ways in which spaces of confinement were experienced from the present. It is, therefore, important to rethink critically the work of memory, since remembrance makes some things from the past visible meanwhile hides or transform others. Taking this perspective into account, our general aim is to analyze state-sponsored violent spaces–such as detention centers for immigrants, CIA “black holes”, or clandestine detention centers–in order to address the following dimensions: How do people perceive and locate themselves in these violent spaces? What kinds of references do people use to speak about spaces where violent acts have occurred and been experienced? What happens when the material references of these spaces are intentionally distorted, denied, or erased? In to what extent do the material, representational, and experiential dimensions of space cohere together?
Thinking Sites of Trauma & Commemoration
Invited Speaker: Joost Fontein, University of Edinburgh
Organizer: Zahira Araguete, Goldsmiths, University of London
Mass graves, unmarked sites where bodies lie after war violence and reburial sites are at the core of important social and familiar practices of remembering and forgetting. Intimate and public forms of mourning and commemoration or collective silence, imbue these spaces where violence occurred, with different uses and works of the imagination. Jay Winter has argued these sites are part of the “cartography of recollection and remembrance” where memory is enacted through speech but also silence. From places of burial and reburial of bodily remains (e.g. Srebrenica-Poto?ari Memorial Centre (Wagner 2008) or the street unmarked burials of Vietnam (Kwon 2008)), to the ruins found in the places of war (e.g. the battlefields of the Western Front (Filippucci 2009), recent works have attempted to show these spaces are marked in the present by distinct forms of social, cultural and political engagement. They are sites of ritual and interaction but also abandonment, where statist, community and family subjectivities manifest, collide and confer. In this panel we seek to explore novel ways of understanding war and death sites in connection to the performance of collective and private forms of remembrance. In this context, how are these sites of trauma and their materiality used in post-conflict endeavors of historical imagination? In which way do public practices of destruction and reconstruction transform the remains of conflict shaping the way the past is imagined or silenced? How can these “ruins” of conflict be thought of as sites where violence is re-enacted by the families and communities?
Documents, Papers, Photographs: Archival Traces & the Production of Memory
Invited Speaker: Paul Basu, University College London
Organizer: Lee Elizabeth Douglas, New York University & CCHS-CSIC
For historians, archives are an important source of data. They are home to the raw material that documents and describes the past. From this standpoint, archival objects are key sources for the production of historical knowledge. However, as scholars have often pointed out, the space of the archive can also be a place of oblivion and silence (Abercrombie 1998; Stoler 2010; Trouillot 1997). Furthermore, the processes of interpreting these archival traces can be potentially violent. Despite the increasing use of digital technologies for making archival materials more accessible, institutional concerns over who has rights over these documentary traces often prohibit archival objects and the knowledge they contain from freely circulating. This panel seeks to examine shared notions about what archives should ideally do while also considering contemporary archival practices and uses. Approaching archives as both repositories of knowledge and potential spaces of restriction, we will discuss the important role that archives play in thinking through the tensions and relationships between remembering and forgetting. Taking on the space of the archive as an analytic object, what kinds of archival practices lend themselves to the production of meaning about violent pasts? What kinds of silences exist within the archival space? How can archival objects be activated through narrative practices? What kinds of imaginary futures does the space of the archive promise in light of the entangled and unformed narratives that it offers?
Locating Transcultural Memory
Invited Speaker: Max Silverman, University of Leeds
Organizer: Marije Hristova, Maastricht University & CCHS-CSIC
Transcultural or transnational processes have been mainly conceived within geographical terms under the influence of postcolonial theorists (e.g. Homi Bhabha’s ‘Third Space’ or Marie Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zones’). In discussions around the topic of memory, the transcultural has been identified as the global movement and circulation of specific memories and narrative frameworks over time (Erll 2011; Rigney 2012). Within the diachronical perspective of Memory Studies, literary scholars like Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman have proposed that transcultural memory should be understood as the binding together or collision between different spatiotemporal frames. At the same time, Susannah Radstone calls attention to the deep connections between transcultural memory and specific spatial and temporal markers by suggesting that, ‘For even when (and if) memory travels, it is ever instantiated locally, in a specific place and at a particular time’ (Radstone 2011: 117). She suggests that we should study the (discursive) spaces in which transcultural memories are actualized. In this panel, we seek to discuss questions related to the representation and imagination of transcultural memories in spatial terms. To what extent can we understand transcultural memory in spatial terms? How can we locate transcultural memory locally and globally? What are the ethical implications of dislocating memories of violent pasts from specific places? The panel aims to explore the workings of transcultural memory through a wide range of mediums including literature, architecture, landscape, museums, film, journalism, etcetera.
Please book your place by sending your details to the email provided below.
thinkingmemorythroughspace.blogspot.com.es
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Jul 2013 | 9:30am - 6:00pm | |
| 12 Jul 2013 | 9:30am - 6:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
