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Paper short abstract

This paper explores "memory walks" in Turkey as urban practices of facing the past. Using ethnography and theories of affect and memory, it examines how affective encounters with places and stories shape everyday ways of engaging with difficult histories.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines affective encounters through urban memorialization practices in the context of facing past atrocities that have shaped present-day societies. Drawing on theories of transitional justice, social memory, place, and affect, and using ethnographic fieldwork as a research method, it focuses on “memory walks” organized by non-governmental organizations in Turkey. Memory walks are one-day-long urban walks in which participants encounter silenced (hi)stories and memories through collective walking and storytelling.

The paper argues that memory walks create ‘in-between’ space and time in which participants face difficult pasts of conflict, violence, and loss through different ways of feeling and knowing. By bringing together urban walking practices, performances of memory, and emotions, the paper seeks to broaden the legal, policy-related, and nation-state-centered approaches to facing the past. It sees facing the past as an open-ended, everyday process, emphasizing how emotions can move people toward or away from critically engaging with the past and their own position within it.

Based on ethnographic data, the paper explores affective encounters among places, memories, and people during memory walks. Engaging with scholarship on affect and emotions, especially Ahmed (2004), Berlant (2011), and Cherry (2021), it analyzes emotions such as shame, empathy, hope, anger, curiosity, and wonder in relation to situatedness, identity, responsibility, and solidarity.

The paper asks: How do affective encounters in memorialization practices shape everyday experiences of facing the past?