Keynote speeches
Daniel Knight
Dr Daniel M. Knight is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. A philosophical and historical anthropologist, he has conducted research in Greece since 2003 on themes of time, crisis, austerity, and the green economy. Daniel is author of 4 monographs and 2 edited volumes, most recently Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres (with Andreas Bandak, Duke University Press, 2024), Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn, 2021), and The Anthropology of the Future (with Rebecca Bryant, Cambridge University Press, 2019). His newest book, forthcoming with Cornell University Press in 2025, deals with concealed knowledge produced in the process of renewable energy transition in the Mediterranean. Daniel has also written on the emerging concepts of polycrisis, emptiness, and social vertigo. He is co-editor of History & Anthropology journal and runs the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Anthropology of Time Network.
Andreas Bandak
Andreas Bandak is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Culture Studies in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He specializes in the themes of temporality and exemplarity and in anthropological studies of Syrian pasts and futures. He is the author of Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainthood in Christian Syria (Toronto, 2022) and has edited several volumes, including Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty (Bloomsbury, 2018), Different Repetitions: Anthropological Engagements with Figures of Return, Recurrence and Redundancy (Routledge, 2021) and most recently Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres (Duke, 2024). He has conducted research in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan and currently is the PI on the collective research project Archiving the Future: Re-Collections of Syria in War and Peace funded by The Independent Research Council Denmark.
As It Were: Narrative Struggles, Historiopraxy and the Stakes of the Future in the Documentation of the Syrian Uprising
In this paper, I consider the struggle over narrative, which now takes place as seen in relation to the bourgeoning production of Syrian documentaries but which also has been evident in the production of Syrian TV-serials. My central concern is to unravel the changing registers of historical experience and the narrative efforts placed in keeping particular pasts alive in order to make way for the future. Inspired by Simon Coleman, I reflect on this as a particular form of historiopraxy (2011), which rearranges and reorders experiences as they oscillate between the singular and the collective, the particular and the generic in the wake of violence and atrocities on a massive scale. As a central trope, I consider the wording ‘as it were’. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, ‘as it were’ sometimes is used after a figurative or unusual expression. ‘As it were’ in this sense may not just point to how things actually were but also to how they potentially could be. This play between actuality, factuality and potentiality is critical for the work on the past both in the aftermath of severe crisis and tragedy but also in any ordinary sense.
Joanna Wawrzyniak is University Professor and Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. She is the President-elect of Memory Studies Association (2024-2025) and the vice-Chair of the COST Action Slow Memory. wawrzyniakj@is.uw.edu.pl
Curating Mnemonic Security: Museums’ Responses to War in Armenia and Poland
In my talk, I will discuss how historical museums deal with the memories of disputed territories during war situations. I will focus on Armenia experiencing the war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh (2020-) and Poland facing the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine (2022-). In the light of the tripartite theory of antagonist, cosmopolitan, and agonist ‘modes of remembrance’ (Bull and Hansen 2016), I will show how museums respond to war challenges by the means of temporary exhibitions, curatorial tours, and other mnemonic activities. Overall, my lecture will reveal the prevalence of the antagonistic approach, however, it will also identify several examples of cosmopolitan and agonistic interventions that merit attention for their transformative impact on conflicting memories of disputed territories. My talk is based on a chapter co-written with Ruzanna Tsaturyan in the framework of the H2020 project DisTerrMem.
Speakers
Jiri Kocian
Jiří Kocián has been the coordinator of the Malach Visual History Centre since 2016. He graduated in area studies with a focus on Central-East and Southeast Europe at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. His research activities at CVHM are mainly devoted to the history of Jews in Central-East and Southeast Europe, the construction of identity narratives, and their social and political reflection. At the same time, in the field of Digital Humanities, he deals with the development and implementation of software tools for social science research.
From Sources to Data: Bottom-up Digitized Interviews Collections Curation
The session will focus on the technological aspects of digital usage, as well as access and processing of archives of cultural heritage. The participants will join a hands-on session which will use the data from the USC SF Visual History Archive as the case for reflecting on various methods, metadata, and work environments that mould the research possibilities and user experiences that those configurations produce.
Luba Jurgenson
Luba Jurgenson is currently full Professor at the Department of Slavic Studies of Sorbonne-University and director of the research center Eur’ORBEM, “Cultures and Societies of Eastern, Balkan and Center Europe” (CNRS/Sorbonne), vice-president of Memorial-France. Her main research area is: representations and memory of mass violence in Eastern and Central Europe (20e century). Her most recent book publications are : Quand nous nous sommes réveillés. Nuit du 24 février 2022 : invasion de l’Ukraine (2023) and Le Semeur d’yeux. Sentiers de Varlam Chalamov (2022).
Memory between Reparation and Prevention. How the Memory of Extreme Violence Can be Seen as a Form of Cure for Societies
Institutionalized collective memory (museums, commemorations, memorial sites) can have a restorative function. It ensures collective mourning (it is therefore supposed to absorb the trauma) and it also has the function of uniting society around a “never again”. It guarantees a social consensus around shared values, which in Europe are those of peace and tolerance. I propose to reflect, through representations, on the way in which the European utopia of memory embraces new trends of inclusion and care. I also propose to compare this utopia of memory based on a dream of peace with the utopia of warlike memory, for example in Russia, where the memory of past victories serves to guarantee future ones, and where the “healing” of the people involves the reconquest of territories thought to have been lost.
Paweł Dobrosielski
Dr Pawel Dobrosielski – cultural studies and philosophy graduate, English language translator, Associate Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. His academic interests include discourse analysis, collective memory and critical studies. The author of a monograph Spory o Grossa. Polskie problemy z pamięcią o Żydach (Disputes over Gross. Polish problems with the memory of Jews), Instytut Badań Literackich PAN, Warszawa 2017 and co-author and co-editor of a collective monograph Ślady Holokaustu w imaginarium kultury polskiej (Traces of the Holocaust in the Polish Cultural Imaginary), Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa 2017. Academic head of the project Discourses of War.
Discourses of War – how the current Russian invasion of Ukraine is narrated through the Second World War and the Holocaust imaginary
The seminar will be based on the intermediary findings of the project Discourses of War, devoted to the analysis of textual and visual accounts of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in the context of references to World War II and the Holocaust. The project’s main aim so far has been to collect, analyse, and interpret various textual and visual forms of representation that constitute the Ukrainian public discourse on the current war, directly or indirectly linking it with the imagery of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The research question of the project was two-fold: How do such analogies shape the perception of the current full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and, simultaneously, the perception of the Second World War and the Holocaust within the realm of collective memory?
Link to the executive summary of the intermediate results: https://netzwerk-erinnerung.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/%D0%97%D0%B2%D1%96%D1%82-%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BB%D1%96%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%B2.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3qPn1eFiD1_-1Z_v_2h9EGlHjAS4N907ORnFJIE-VvGFsN1TS11F6zPJo
Pietro Conte
Pietro Conte is an Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan. Before taking on his current position, he worked at the University of Lisbon (2015-2018) and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2018-2022). His research focuses on illusion, hyperrealism, immersive (virtual) environments and the multifarious practices of un-framing, a thematic cluster he first explored in the monographs Unframing Aesthetics (2019) and In carne e cera. Estetica e fenomenologia dell’iperrealismo [Flesh and Wax: Aesthetics and Phenomenology of Hyperrealism] (2014). Pietro is a team member of the ERC project “An-Iconology: History, theory, and practices of environmental images”, where he is carrying out research on digital immortality and contemporary developments in thanatology.
From Monuments to VR: Keeping the Memory of ‘Comfort Women’’s Alive
Before and during the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of women and girls (mostly Korean) were forced by the Imperial Japanese Army to work as prostitutes in the brothels of occupied countries and territories. The Japanese government tried to hide their exploitation by calling them nurses and maids. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss how visual strategies were used to misleadingly portray these forced prostitutes as ‘comfort women’, such as nurses and maids. I will then focus on how the memory of the victims is kept alive around the world through interactive memorials and virtual reality experiences. Particular attention will be paid to the dialectics of presence and absence, activity and passivity that these memorialising practices bring to the fore.
