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- Convenors:
-
Birgit Bräuchler
(University of Copenhagen)
Sina Emde (Leipzig University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 26 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How people remember a violent past determines how they envision the future. Focusing on transgenerational and performative memory work of young people, we investigate the transformative potential of memory and factors facilitating/hindering a creative engagement with the past towards peace.
Long Abstract:
In many post-conflict settings, performative and transgenerational remembrance are seen as pathways towards more peaceful futures. To facilitate transformation and to potentially generate hope, such memory work requires 1) creative approaches that open up spaces for reflection, reconstruction and engagement, and 2) supportive wider contexts. Together, they allow for the negotiation of desired futures. In this panel, we want to investigate the transformative potential of memory and ask which factors support hopeful processes of remembering and which factors hinder, discourage or undermine a creative and transformative engagement with the past - be it, for instance, a specific political climate, lack of access to creative means or the lack of motivation to engage in such work. With our focus on transgenerational and performative memory work, we are particularly interested in how young people who grew up during violent conflict or were born in its aftermath remember that violence. We also ask how the youth is part or a target group of national/international programs or interventions aimed to create transgenerational memoryscapes. How do young actors creatively engage with memory, for instance through social media, arts, storytelling, alternative participatory transitional justice tools and others and how are these practices inspired by both global patterns and aesthetics of memorialisation and local cultural approaches to reconciliation and remembrance? For our panel, we invite scholars who study and/or themselves engage in such transformative creative memory work and analyses based on both empirical field research material as well as conceptual reflections that resonate with our panel themes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Exploring former child soldier’s memory work in social media, this paper investigates how digital connectivity, creativity, transcultural memory and the cultural and political contexts of media usage can both solidify hegemonic memory narratives and transform traumatic memories into hope and peace.
Paper long abstract:
Digital technologies are playing increasingly important roles in memory processes, including the way we remember past violence and war. The way this relationship unfolds, that is how violent conflict is remembered on digital platforms, can be critical for the prevention of future violence. This paper looks at memory work in a video posted in social media, featuring former child soldiers in Indonesia and their story from mutual hatred and war to friendship and peace. The video post opened up space for a lively debate. By analyzing and comparing the video and the English and Indonesian commentaries, this paper explores how violence in Indonesia is remembered, how that memory travels, and how it is translated and received by different audiences. It explores how connectivity and creativity open up new memoryscapes and how, within these digital spaces, transcultural memory tropes and political and cultural contexts of social media users can both solidify hegemonic memory narratives and transform traumatic memories into hope and peace.
Paper short abstract:
The paper follows a 2019 project “Truth and Reconciliation in Serbia,” a series of workshops for young journalists and activists. This project represents a shift in memory activism in Serbia as it balances between narratives on crimes and victims.
Paper long abstract:
In 2011, I participated in a seminar about human rights organized by a Serbian liberal NGO, Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR). One of the topics was war crimes committed by the Serbian army during the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia. The seminar allocated little space for Serbian victims and insisted on narratives of Serbs as the foremost perpetrators in the conflicts. Knowing the background of the YIHR, insisting on Serbian war crimes was not a big surprise. During the wars of the 1990s in former Yugoslavia, NGOs dealing with peacebuilding and reconciliation mushroomed across the region. Memory activism became an essential aspect of Serbian civil society, where war-related issues represented social taboo. While the Serbian state’s official memory politics worked towards silencing the war crimes, the NGOs aimed to face society with past wrongdoings.
A decade after my first contact with the organization, the focus of the memory narratives was rebalanced from exclusively Serbian crimes to an equal talk about Serbian victims. In this paper, I analyze a 2019 project by YIHR, “Truth and Reconciliation in Serbia,” a series of workshops for young journalists and activists. The paper aims to understand how the switch of memory discourses towards more space for Serbian victims occurred. Based on participant observation and interviews with the organizers and activists, the paper shows how the new generations attempt to relax the polarized discourse about crimes and victims.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora negotiate different temporalities of memory. By reflecting on the production of a theatre play I will explore how postmemorial complexities found their expression and how these informed the young people’s aspirations for the future.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how young people in the Guatemalan diaspora negotiate different temporalities of memory. By reflecting on the production of a theatre play I will explore how postmemorial complexities found their expression through theatre and how these informed the young people’s aspirations for the future. The Guatemalan diaspora in Chiapas is situated in between two large migratory movements (civil-war refugees from the 1980s and contemporary US-bound migrants). This paper explores young people’s performative engagement with their town’s past and the ways in which their remembrances and future-aspirations are interlinked. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and now with young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in Southern Mexico and subsequently in the United States. My engagement with the young research participants was informed by ideas from ethnographic fieldwork as well as principles and practices from participatory and creative community & youth work. Through creative engagement with theatre and photography my interlocutors explored the refugee pasts of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation and contrasted them with their own aspirations and imaginations of migrating to the United States. Conceptually this paper explores how ‘imagining the future is just another form of memory’ and the role that performative and embodied registers play within this process. Storytelling and performance function as strategies which highlight young people’s active role in the social making of their hometown, the formation of diasporic identities and the creation of hopeful futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores post-conflict memory work at the intersection of international transitional justice funding, national politics of memory and local engagements with a violent past in post-conflict Cambodia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper situates post-conflict memory work at the intersection of international transitional justice funding, national politics of memory and local engagements with a violent past. It explores the work of a Cambodian Youth NGO in the context of outreach activities for the Extraordinary Chambers in the courts of Cambodia (ECCC), also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, in the years 2009 to 2011 in a village at a former Khmer Rouge prison site. Partly funded and advised by the German Civil Peace Service, the NGO deployed art as a major vehicle for collective transgenerational memory work. The art project took place in cooperation with a local memory committee of elders and a youth group. While the project ran successfully for a few years, a decline of engagement set in at a later stage due to internal problems of the NGO as well as the decrease of outreach activities and funding at the ECCC and by international donors. The national political climate had also changed over the years from a favourable to a more negative outlook towards transitional justice activities. In addition, many young people in the village finished high school and left for further education or employment to town. That said the project left impressive material traces in forms of a local memorial site and a learning centre. The peacebuilding activities themselves have become part of the collective memory of the village and strengthened the village's social fabric. Many of the young people involved both from the NGO and the village had built valuable capacities that laid foundations for further studies and work careers.
Paper short abstract:
The contribution reflects about the competing character of regional indigenous memory cultures, national memoryscapes transmitted in public school education and social media as new forum for the production of historical conscience at the example of the so called “Mexican Caste Wars” (19th century).
Paper long abstract:
The contribution reflects about the competing character of regional indigenous memory cultures, national memoryscapes transmitted in public school education, and social media as new forum for the production of historical conscience at the example of the so called “Mexican Caste Wars”.
Those regional conflicts of the 19th century between indigenous or mixed rebel groups against the Republic of Mexico and its liberal elites, have become a topic of history teaching in the 1990-ies in the Mexican school system. Within the national myth making, those conflicts were turned into predecessors of the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 1920) and the resistance of indigenous groups against (land) exploitation is now interpreted as early form of national heroism. This national ideological interpretation meets in some regions with strong local memory cultures on resistance against land expropriation, related with traumatic experiences because of the loss of fathers, mothers, physical and mental injuries, periods of suffering (escape, hunger, homelessness and prosecution), turning the Mexican state into an enemy. One might suppose that in those instances, local and national memory cultures have to be competitive.
Based on interviews with teachers and workshops with school children among indigenous schools in Sonora and in Quintana Roo, the contribution shows, how school education strengthens local memory culture. The ethnographic data also shows how both systems are endangered by social media and changing working conditions because both transform transgenerational communication systems. Specifically social media promise a decolonial approach towards autonomous historical conscience, but tend to be governed by a global "user-cracy".