CfP: 2024 Conference: A Mnemonic Turn and the Future of Democratic Politics
The Memory Studies Network (MSN) of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research, in partnership with the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS) invites you to the international conference,
A Mnemonic Turn and the Future of Democratic Politics
The New School for Social Research
New York City
April 24-25, 2025
Call for Papers
Deadline: November 30, 2024
We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the international conference, A Mnemonic Turn and the Future of Democratic Politics, scheduled for April 24-25, 2025. We hope the conference will contribute to a discussion on the vital yet complex and tense relationship between collective memory and democracy today.
The recent consideration of the “mnemonic turn” (Olick 2023), implies a major change in how societies view, study, represent, and instrumentalize the past in service of both the present and the future. The conference aims to discuss further how collective memory engages the actors, adjusts structures, and penetrates mechanisms of democratic politics, revealing its double — both constructive and destructive — potential. Moreover, reflection on the relationship between memory and democracy remains equally significant in the context of contemporary non-democratic and violent regimes, where the past is increasingly employed as a tool of war propaganda and to limit freedoms.
Background
In recent decades, there has been a significant breakthrough in recognizing the importance of collective memory in understanding historical and social phenomena, as well as in shaping contemporary political life. The rapidly growing field of memory studies has absorbed phenomena, concepts, and approaches that relate to the reconstruction and representation of the past for individuals and societies, such as oral history, autobiography, myth, tradition, memorialization, and commemorations. Consequently, memory has evolved into a “metahistorical category” that encompasses and integrates a wide range of disciplines dealing with the past, including history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary studies, all of which engage with processes of remembering and reconstructing the past (Klein 2000).
The quest for a shared history and identity serves as an essential mechanism for marginalized groups to demand recognition, reparations, and institutional reforms, ultimately pressing for the democratization of memory, greater transparency, justice, and inclusive politics to safeguard against authoritarianism.
Collective memory is crucial for confronting difficult pasts by upholding the moral imperative “never again.” Mass atrocities during WWII in Europe and the Far East, in Latin America and Africa, as well as in recent wars and conflicts, such as Ukraine and the Middle East, are crucial for understanding the need for democracy. This includes the crimes committed by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes against their own societies and the memory of unprosecuted and unpunished crimes.
Memorial culture may reinforce democratic values and moral principles of justice, equality, and human rights by building mnemonic infrastructures—national monuments, museums, and commemorations of pivotal historical events. However, memory can also act as a divisive force within democratic societies. Contentious and contested narratives of an “unmastered past” (Olick 2023), involving deeply troubling colonial experiences, slavery, authoritarianism, dictatorship, ethnic and religious conflicts, and crimes, can polarize societies when these legacies have not been fully processed, acknowledged, or reconciled. “Memory wars” often challenge social cohesion and fuel intense debates about identity and belonging, resulting in the political exclusion and marginalization of certain groups and communities. We aim to address unresolved aspects of the past, such as the lack of accountability for oppressive regimes, insufficient reckoning with authoritarian crimes, and incomplete historical justice in many contexts worldwide. Our focus is on how these unaddressed legacies continue to shape current challenges and socio-political dynamics across different regions.
Collective memory is an essential but contested element of social life, capable of both sustaining and challenging democratic institutions and processes. It can activate public debates on social justice, rights, freedoms, and equality and assist citizens in enacting democracy, but it can also be used and abused for political gain. Democracy Dies in Darkness — reads the wise motto adopted by the Washington Post in 2017. The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, may have shown some foresight when he stated, “Certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light.” The task of our conference is to shed light on our past and illuminate our present and future. We hope that you can join us in this endeavor.
The Conference: proposed themes and submission details
This year’s conference will engage with the proposed wide-ranging theme of A Mnemonic Turn and the Future of Democratic Politics, accommodating a variety of issues particularly relevant to the current pressing concerns of collective memory and democracy. These issues include, but are not limited to:
- The democratic potential of memory politics
- The role of both social and academic institutions in shaping collective memory
- The emergence of repressed or unmastered pasts
- Transitional justice and memory politics
- The intersection of demos and ethnos in shaping new mnemonic practices
- The crisis of the post-WWII moral and memory consensus: How does the politics of forgetting fuel the resurgence of authoritarian governments?
- The authoritarian appropriation of memory politics
- The transformative power of public discourse
- Decolonization and memory: reclaiming the past as a form of identity politics
- The upsurge of memory movements and mnemonic practices
- The emergence of grassroots memory representations and resistance movements
- Challenges posed by the mnemonic turn and the prevalence of post-truth narratives
- The question of unfinished/incomplete historical narratives: the interplay between memory and history
- Memory, geopolitics, and democracy
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We welcome submissions from advanced graduate students, scholars, artists, and memory activists interested in presenting their reflections, artifacts, or performances relevant to the conference topics.
Please send your proposals (title and abstract at max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) to memorystudies@newschool.edu by November 30, 2024. Applicants will be informed of a decision by December 20, 2024.
For those accepted, final papers (or presentations) will be due two weeks before the conference.
The conference will be in person only and open to the public (with RVSP).
