The Centre for Culture and Cultural Studies (CCCS)

The Balkan Network for Culture and Culture Studies (BNCCS)

Annual Conference 2013: «Cultural Memory»

September 5-6, 2013, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia

The deadline for proposals is February 1st, 2013

The Centre for Culture and Cultural Studies (CCCS) and The Balkan Network for Culture and Culture Studies (BNCCS) will organize the first of many to follow, annually-held conferences, under the overarching theme «Cultural Memory».

The interest in the past, and consequently, the interest in collective and individual memory, is quite pertinent to our overall present-day research interests. Finding a way to articulate and express individual and collective identities, which find themselves under the undeniable pressure of globalization, transition and consumer processes, is becoming increasingly important. On the one hand, in today’s contemporary, post-modern societies, the various ethnic groups call for recognition, which in turn demonstrates a need for the construction of their pasts, and thus, their cultural memories. On the other hand, if national, regional, religious and/or local cultural identities present today were portrayed as more or less stable entities, today they may be observed as nothing more than events, changes or conflicts usually associated with secularization, industrialization, globalization, migration, or many other political, economic, cultural and/or religious. From this stance, culture is seen as shaped under the influence of processes that stand in constant mutual tension. In other words, it is located in a state of constant negotiation with the newly present conditions, values, ideas and beliefs, set in circumstances whence the previously dominant segments are no longer present. In such processes, the term memory occupies a central role.

The objective of this first conference is twofold: namely, to contribute to the study of cultural memory by unlocking narratives about the past (and their canonization), and offer relevant critical observations on the manifestations of cultural memory that are not essentially ‘narratives’. This approach provides a kind of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary access to cultural memory taken from various perspectives.

In this context, we are faced the following questions: how do we recall, remember and forget? What stories are ‘permitted’ and which are ‘forbidden’? How does the past determine the present and shape the future? How do the various discourses of the past determine the social and personal identities? How are our deepest emotions, desires and fantasies articulated in the present through the discursive space of memory? What are the relations between memory and monuments, archives and museums? How can we understand the dual nature of monuments: as tools of ideologically driven memory (fixed memory) and/or as constant sources of creative construction and opening up of memory? Does technological development influence the process of remembering the past? What are the implications of a digitalization of memory? What kind of history is created by the massive use of digital technologies (i.e., online archives that are encoding/decoding their users’ memories in virtual space)? How do the systems used for production affect the ways that use, protect and work with memory? In what ways is cultural tourism associated with memory? How does it reflect the local and global histories in terms of which narratives are being produced and consumed?

On that note, individual and collective memory within the processes of creating identities provides for the contemporary researcher indispensable links to the myriad present-day realities that are at the same time quite problematic. This duality manifests itself in the creative and conceptual forms of expression. Hence, the aim of the conference is to bring closer the various aspects applied in studying cultural memory. The conference aims at fostering a critical dialogue beyond the boundaries set by various disciplines, thus papers from various disciplines and fields are most welcomed, including art history, literature, anthropology, architecture, philosophy, political science, sociology, cultural geography, cultural studies, media and film studies, ethnology and folklore, economics, history, heritage studies, museum studies, landscape studies, leisure studies, tourism studies, transport studies and urban/spatial planning.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Cultural Memory and Identity: family memory; biographical and autobiographical memory; the ‘homå’; immigration; the migrant; borders; nationalism; ethnicity; history and changing historical narratives; tradition; violence; trauma and terror; forgiveness; memories of transitions: important personal and national events.

Cultural Memory and Politics: the use of propaganda; the use of cultural memory; the politics of cultural memory; authority; resistance; creating cultural memory; collective remembering and forgetting.

Cultural Memory and Space/Place: architecture; geography (cartography); the city and urbanization; the use of nature in the collective memory; transformed places; monuments, archives, museums.

Cultural Memory and Social Institutions/Cultural Products: myth; religion; art/literature presentation; language; clashing memories, popular culture.

Cultural Memory and Everyday Life: rituals; bodily practices; nostalgia.

Mediated Memories: cultural representations; mass media/digitalized memories; virtual memories.

Cultural Memory and Tourism: ‘imagined routes’ (mythic highways and meta-narratives); crossing boundaries; war itineraries; violence and displacement; consumerism.

Papers, creative projects, and other non-traditional presentations exploring the aforementioned topics are also welcomed.

The Conference will be held on September 5-6, 2013 in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia.

Please submit your proposals to conference@cultcenter.net by February 1st, 2013.

Submissions should include a 250-300 word abstract, keywords and a brief bio, as well as a contact address.

The paper proposals should be prepared filling in a paper form.

Please feel free to contact Loreta Georgievska-Jakovleva (lgeorgievska@yahoo.com) or Mishel Pavlovski (mpavlovski@iml.ukim.edu.mk) with any interim questions.

Notifications of acceptance would come no later than February 15th, 2013.

Abstracts will be published and made available with the conference materials. Full papers will be published in the peer-rewieved journal «Култура/Culture».

We are seeking proposals for panels within the scope of the Conference

Panels are organized by internationally recognized experts aiming to bring together researchers on focused topics for an interactive discussion among the panel members and the participants. Panels are an important component of Annual Conference 2013. Panel members are researchers who have done well-known or controversial work related to the theme of the panel. Researchers interested in organizing a special session are invited to submit a formal proposal to conference@cultcenter.net by February 1st, 2013.

Before submitting a panel proposal, the organizer of a panel is expected to contact all the proposed panel members and get their agreement to serve as a panel member. A list of questions to be discussed in the panel should be made available to all the panel members well ahead of time for them to prepare their response. Each panel typically allows a certain amount of time for each panel member to present their response before an open discussion is opened.

The panel proposals should be prepared filling in a panel form.

Fees:

Early registration (till April 1st, 2013): € 40 (for members of The Balkan Network for Culture and Cultural Studies – € 20)

Late registration (till August 15th, 2013): € 60 (for members of The Balkan Network for Culture and Cultural Studies – € 40)

On-site registration (or after August 15th, 2013): € 80 (for members of The Balkan Network for Culture and Cultural Studies – € 60)

The registration fee includes the conference materials, the publication of the abstract and the papers, refreshment breaks, a welcome dinner for all participants of the Conference.

The Centre for Culture and Cultural Studies web site: http://www.cultcenter.net/

Conference web site: http://www.cultcenter.net/conf2013.php

«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.

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/

CALL FOR PAPERS

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