Feminist Afterlives (original) (raw)
Related papers
Memory and Culture in Social Movements (2014)
Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research. eds Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi, and Peter Ullrich, 2014
When telling alternative stories on the Internet and in street protest, activists publicize memories excluded from national history books and mainstream media audiences. At the same time, officials also publicize claims for apology and repair in official public commemorations created for reconciliation. How do social movements construct and use memory, and how does the politics of memory shape cultural meaning-making in movements? To begin answering this question, my contribution brings together a cultural sociology of social movements with an interdisciplinary analysis of memory drawing on psychoanalytical, visual, and historical approaches. Movement scholars who focused on narrative, discourse, framing, and performance show how activists actively construct and mobilize collective memory. We know much less, however, about interactions between multiple layers and forms of remembering stored in images, stories, or performances, or discursive forms. How do conflicting or contradictory memories about the past inside movement groups condition activists' ability to speak, write, and even think about the future?
Remembering activism: Means and ends
Memory Studies: Special Issue, 2024
This editorial introduces the 12 articles collected in this special issue on Remembering Activism: Explorations in the memory-activism nexus. It frames the articles within current debates in the field of memory studies and social movement studies on the entanglements between memory work, on the one hand, and activism directed towards social transformation, on the other. In particular, it highlights the ways in which the memory of earlier activism is mobilised within later movements; in the process, it also identifies various forms of activist memory work where remembrance is an integral part of the activist repertoire and one of the means used to achieve political ends.
Memory Work and Militancy: Performing Feminist Diasporic Remembrance at a Distance
Art Papers, 2020
This essay frames feminist memory work and the “responsibility to recall” in West Asian diasporas as agents of political transformation. The essay addresses a performance by She Loves — a collective of Armenian women artists — entitled “The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have,” a work that responds to the struggle for self-determination in the Republic of Artsakh. Through the lens of this work, the essay argues for the diasporic body and its inscriptions of collective cultural memory as a weapon against the forces of historical erasure.
As a research method memory-work deserves much more attention than it enjoys currently. The method originates from the West-German feminist movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s. It was developed as a collective research tool to bring the experiences of women which were found to be absent in scientific discourse into debate. The method in a nutshell: i) Group members discuss the topic at hand to understand their individual points of view on the matter ii) Members write stories of an event relating to the topic which they experienced themselves. iii) Stories are analysed by the group in a set procedure of ‘deconstruction’. iv) Results of the text-analyses (step iii) and initial discussion (step i) are set in relation to each other. The intertwined process of giving meaning to one’s own experiences and struggling for social recognition of one’s own image in a specific historical and material situation come to the fore when the material generated by participants is analysed. The reconstruction of the scenes gives rise to new interpretations and opens the view for alternative routes of action. As a research tool memory work has been used in feminist studies, but also on topics like migration, media experiences, teacher training, sport, tourist experiences. As a method developed from within an emancipative social movement memory-work offers a tool for social science in an enhanced attempt to understand the human essence in its reality as the ensemble of social relations and effectively help in generating articulated alternatives.
Event-making the past: commemorations as social movement catalysts
While shared narratives of the past have long been considered functional in terms of legitimising, coordinating and directing movement imaginary and action, it is not until recently that studies of memory and social movements have begun to interact systematically. Furthermore, these studies have treated mnemonic practices from a cognitive perspective rather than an affective, relational stance. This article analyses the mass commemoration of mafia victims that took place in Bologna on 21 March 2015 using an affective lens. It shifts the focus from memory as an identity-shaping, community-building force, to memory as a mobilising force that intensifies and fuels heterogeneous and multidirectional movements such as the anti-mafia. In particular, it highlights the suggestive force of objects, discourses and bodies that together catalyse the crowd, drawing from ethnographic material. It concludes that what is ritualised, and thus important for the movement's direction, is the way the past is presented and lived through the event. It suggests that the study of social movements and memory can benefit from the affective turn in memory studies.
H-Soz-Kult
Renewed disputes over public memorial statues at the heart of grassroots responses to neo-Nazi mobilisations within and beyond the United States have once again signalled the need for historians to better come to terms with the connections between memory, social movements and memorialisation. This was the aim of the “History, Memory, and Social Movements” conference on 19-20 July 2017 hosted by the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum. The gathering was part of an ongoing collaborative project with the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, jointly led by Stefan Berger (Bochum) and Sean Scalmer (Melbourne). The project overall aims to bring the fields of social movement history and memory studies into more active dialogue. https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-7336
Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories
Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict Unwanted Memories, 2022
This book investigates the study of memory activism and memory of activism, emerging after conflict, as a political civic action. It examines the appearance and growth of memory activism in Serbia amid the legacies of unwanted memories of the wars of the 1990s, approaching the post-Yugoslav region as a region of memory and tracing the alternative calendars and alternative commemorative practices of memory activists as they have evolved over a period of more than two decades. By presenting in-depth accounts of memory activism practices, on-site and online, Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories analyses this evolution in the context of generational belonging and introduces frameworks for the study of #hashtag #memoryactivism, alternative commemorations and commemorative solidarity.