«Violencia política y social en la Europa de la segunda posguerra: balances y nuevas lineas de investigación»

Fecha tope: 10 de enero de 2013

The research group of: “Political and Social Violence in Postwar Europe. Outcomes and Research Perspectives” is organizing four workshops in spring 2013, autumn 2013, spring 2014 and autumn 2014. The workshops will be held at the Istituto storico della Resistenza in Toscana di Firenze (Isrt), at the Istituto per la Storia della Resistenza e della Società contemporanea in provincia di Reggio Emilia (Istoreco) and at the Università degli Studi della Tuscia (Viterbo).

We are interested in political and social violence in Europe after 1945, particularly in Italy, Spain and Germany from a comparative perspective. These three countries experienced similar episodes of political violence just after the Second World War, despite juridical, economic and political differences. The violence occurred both from above (“institutional violence”) and from below (“popular violence”). Examples of “institutional violence” include the preventive detention or administrative detention with no due process for suspected former Nazis in Germany after 1945; or some exceptional Italian laws for special courts with reduced guarantees for the accused to punish fascist crimes. Examples of “popular violence” include operations of former partisans in Italy or the anti-Franco guerrilla resistance in Spain. At the same time, due to conditions of poverty and hunger, social violence unconnected to political claims emerged. Since the border between political and social violence was often undefined it can be difficult to distinguish these two categories.

Forms of violence, occurring in the three countries until the end of the 1940’s, were strictly connected to World War II, but some historical continuities can be observed both in the period before World War II and the post-war decades.

The workshops will be on the following fields of study:

1. Introduction to the issue of the political and social violence in the immediate aftermath of WWII through historiographic questions, debates on the topic, new interpretive approaches and methodological hypothesis.

2. Political and social violence after 1945 in Western Europe: national case studies.

3. The Politics of Punishment: judicial and private uses of violence.

4. Continuities during the second half of the 20th Century in Italy and Europe: management of the public order, practices, language and symbolism of the political and social conflicts.

We seek to develop a team of scholars that can report on the studies about violence after the Second World War in Western Europe (we will also accept proposal about other national case in addition to the three considered). Each scholar will be required to discuss a paper within a workshop and is encouraged to attend the other three. To maximize time for discussion, papers will be circulated in advance to the participants (presenters and discussants).

We particularly welcome the involvement of both established and junior scholars, Post-Doc students and PhD students. We encourage papers on national/local studies and on new interpretative and methodological hypotheses in a comparative perspective.

To be considered for the workshops, please submit a 300-word abstract of your proposed paper, in English or Italian, as well as a brief CV by 10 January 2013 to seminarioviolenza@gmail.com

Successful applicants will be notified by the end of January.

We may be able to assist presenters by partly covering the cost of travel and accommodation.

Scientific Committee: Enrico Acciai (coordinator), Guido Panvini, Camilla Poesio (coordinator), Toni Rovatti.

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Congreso internacional

POSGUERRAS. 75 ANIVERSARIO DEL FIN DE LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA

Lugar: Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Fechas: 3-5 de abril de 2014

Fecha límite: 31 de octubre de 2013

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Congreso internacional

POSGUERRAS. 75 ANIVERSARIO DEL FIN DE LA GUERRA CIVIL ESPAÑOLA

Lugar: Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Fechas: 3-5 de abril de 2014

Fecha límite: 31 de octubre de 2013

El Seminario Complutense Historia, Cultura y Memoria y las entidades del Proyecto ‘Posguerras’, celebrarán los días 3, 4 y 5 de abril de 2014 el Congreso Internacional «Posguerras. 75 aniversario del fin de la Guerra Civil española.» El congreso pretende convertirse en un encuentro para el balance y la reflexión sobre las últimas aportaciones al estudio de las consecuencias de la Guerra Civil, así como en un foro de discusión para plantear futuras líneas de investigación sobre la posguerra en España. Las sesiones del Congreso se organizarán en torno a once mesas-taller para las que se abre un plazo de presentación de comunicaciones.

Mesas:

I. La quiebra de la Modernidad tras el fin de la Guerra Civil, 1900-1936

II. Resistencias, represión y control social

III. El exilio científico y cultural

IV. Historiografías: la posguerra española en el contexto de las posguerras globales

V. Taller «Didáctica de la Guerra Civil y el Franquismo»

VI. Inserción, aislamiento y condena internacional

VII. Medios de comunicación, propaganda y religión

VIII. Mujeres, sexualidad e identidad nacional

IX. Guerra, cultura popular y reconstrucción nacional

X. Memoria traumática, conflicto y posconflicto

XI. Literatura de posguerra: connivencias, resistencias y colaboración al discurso de legitimación

Las propuestas de comunicación deberán enviarse antes del día 31 de octubre de 2013 al correo oficial del congreso: congresoposguerras@gmail.com. La propuesta de comunicación se presentará en un documento word, que incluya el título, nombre y apellidos del autor, centro de trabajo o investigación, email de contacto, mesa a la que se dirige la propuesta y un breve resumen de la comunicación de no más de 350 palabras. Una vez cerrado el plazo de presentación de comunicaciones y evaluadas las propuestas, se publicará su distribución por mesas. Se aceptan propuestas y comunicaciones en inglés, francés o castellano. El idioma del Congreso será el castellano. Para la edición de las actas, se ha solicitado el ISBN con el mismo título del Congreso. Toda la información sobre el Congreso y sobre el Proyecto ‘Posguerras’ puede encontrarse en la Web:

http://geografiaehistoria.ucm.es/congreso-posguerras-75-aniversario-de-la-guerra-civil-espanola

CALL FOR PAPERS

Remembering in a Globalizing World: The Play and Interplay of Tourism, Memory, and Place

Date: September 8-10, 2014

Place: Le Chambon sur Lignon, France

CALL FOR PAPERS

Remembering in a Globalizing World: The Play and Interplay of Tourism, Memory, and Place

Date: September 8-10, 2014

Place: Le Chambon sur Lignon, France

Official Partners: University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), Amar Singh College, University of Kashmir (India), University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences (Netherland), University of Laval (Canada), University of Trois Rivières (Canada)

DEADLINE for long abstracts: All abstracts should be written in English and must not exceed 1000 words in length. Abstracts should be sent to hertzog.anne@wanadoo.fr and  tourismemory@gmail.com before 30 November 2013, and must include: author(s), affiliation(s), a summary of the research aims, approach and key arguments/findings, and the mode of the presentation.

For more information:

http://tourismemoryconference.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/remembering-in-a-globalizing-world-the-play-and-interplay-of-tourism-memory-and-place/

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International Conference:

Things to Remember: Materializing Memories in Art and Popular Culture

Dates: June 5-6, 2014

Place: Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands)

Deadline for paper proposals: January 7, 2014

Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but as memory itself.

The international conference Things to Remember: Materializing Memories aims to explore a sustained focus on the materiality in and of memory. Such a focus helps to understand memory as a vibrant process, by analysing the active, creative and popular forms of remembering and forgetting. At the same time a materialist focus entails recognising certain forms of agency in material objects. As Bill Brown argues, a culture constitutes itself through its inanimate objects: ‘culture as it is objectified in material forms’. In this conference we want to draw cultural memory into the discourse of ‘new materialism’, inquiring how we remember with and through things. Here we avoid simple dualisms by foregrounding the intersections between the material and immaterial, natural and cultural, living or inert. Things make us remember (and forget), yet we also use things to bring about remembrance or forgetfulness. We therefore argue that memory is both mental and material.

The conference foregrounds the materiality of memory by investigating the vital relations between past and present, absence and presence, and remembrance and object. We thus interrogate the material transfers through which cultural memories of the past are expressed and circulated in art, media and popular culture. These transfers produce, re-present and transform mediated memories, literally giving shape to them in words, images, and objects. The conference pays as much attention to how we remember, create and re-create memories as to what we remember. Cultural memory is taken as both an active process and a dynamic practice. In such processes and practices of remembering, objects and things are endowed with meaning, agency and affect. As Bergson put it poetically, recollection is like ‘a fold in a material’. This raises the question how cultural memory plays a role in the social and cultural life of objects. Or, vice versa, what is the role that material things and objects play in ‘doing’ memory? That role will entail a study of the interaction between the materiality of memory, its affective nature, and its ideological frameworks. The conference will explore how memory unfolds time in its objectified materializations, both looking forwards and backwards, and realizing the affective dimensions of the here and now.

This conference will be centred on the following questions: What kind of memory-work do objects do? How does materiality mediate memory, for the individual and for society? What is the role of memory and forgetting in the social and cultural life of objects? Or vice versa, what is the role that material things and objects play in constructing memories? How do art objects and practices bring the past in the present? And how do they open up possibilities for a different future? How is the object endowed with meaning, affect and agency through the recollections attached to it?

We are particularly interested in: analyses of what is at stake in the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesis that make up cultural memory; studies of how memory, object and affect are contingent on one another in their relation to time, both looking forwards and backwards; and explorations of how art and popular culture, in producing material memories, may produce a relevant experience for the spectator, visitor, listener or reader.

The conference aims at covering a wide range of artistic disciplines: fine arts, architecture, literature, music, cinema, theatre, digital media and fashion. We welcome proposals for papers as well as for three-paper panels.

Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

Thing-memory

Art as a memory trigger

Literary and artistic interventions in cultural forgetting

Consumer culture as planned obsolescence

The consumption of the past in contemporary fashion

Remembering forgotten writers and artists

The production of presence and absence

The persistence of the historical past

Theories of matter, thing, and object

Trauma and materiality

Discarded and recycled objects

Souvenirs, gifts, kitsch objects

Toys, models, and miniature objects as things of memory

Ruins and material remains of the past

Our previous successful conferences resulted in two book publications:

Technologies of Memory in the Arts, edited by L. Plate & A. Smelik (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009).

Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by L. Plate & A. Smelik (Routledge, 2013).

Please submit your proposal for a 20-minute paper; or for a panel session of three papers through the conference website: http://www.ru.nl/hlcs/programma’s/things-to-remember/things-to-remember/

Conference committee

Marguérite Corporaal, László Munteán, Vincent Meelberg, Liedeke Plate, Anneke Smelik, Lianne Toussaint, Wouter Weijers

Contact information

e-mailadres: thingstoremember@let.ru.nl

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Violence of War: Experiences and Images of Conflict

Date: Thursday 19 and Friday 20 June 2014

Place: University College London

Deadline: January 31, 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Violence of War: Experiences and Images of Conflict

Date: Thursday 19 and Friday 20 June 2014

Place: University College London

Deadline: January 31, 2014

Although historians dealing with war will inevitably be called to concentrate their attention on violence, often the understanding of how violence itself was perceived, understood, imagined and experienced by combatants and civilians is neglected. Much still needs to be said about how war was shaped by and, in turn, influenced, modern perceptions of violence. Considering war, as John Keegan has put it, first and foremost as ‘a cultural act’, this conference calls attention to the ways in which warfare violence was imagined and understood during the modern era, focusing on the distance between expectations and experiences of war; on the distance between – or coincidence of – ‘imagined’ and the ‘real’ wars. The period considered ranges from the Crimean War to the Second World War and its aftermath.

Topics relevant to this conference may include, but are by no means limited to, the following issues:

1. How have different disciplines examined and explained acts of violence?

2. Is it possible to identify specific cultures of violence in the pre-war era as well as during the war itself? 3. What was the impact of situational and intentional factors on killing and brutalisation? 4. To discuss how we can explain atrocities – as actions motivated by belief, as an unexpectedly horrifying consequence of obeying orders or as matter-of-fact acts of killing. 5. To compare the traumatising effect of violence with pleasure, excitement or gratification in carrying out acts of violence.

We welcome submissions from cultural, social, military, intellectual and other historians and from scholars from neighbouring disciplines (history of art, literary criticism, international relations, war studies, historical sociology, political science and philosophy, amongst others). We encourage a variety of methodological approaches and we particularly welcome the submission of theoretical papers, particularly from sociologists, philosophers, political scientists and anthropologists who have an interest in history.

If you are interested in presenting a 15 minute paper, please send a title, an abstract of no more than 400 words and a short CV to Dr. Matthew D’Auria (m.d’auria@ucl.ac.uk)

Deadline for submission is Friday 31 January 2014.

We plan to publish an edited volume based on a selection of the papers presented at the conference. Please indicate therefore whether you would be interested in further developing your paper for publication after the event.

Limited funding is available. However, we ask participants to apply for funding from their own.