Moving Memory Symposium-Festival Berlin 2016

This roundtable brings together a group of academics and artists working throughout Europe to discuss the question of memory in theoretical and artistic contexts at a historical moment highly preoccupied with acts of commemoration and moving memory. Convened by Charlotte McIvor and Emilie Pine Participants: Stef Craps, Ghent University; Astrid Erll, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main; Paula McFetridge, Kabosh Productions; Ann Rigney, Utrecht University; Dominic Thorpe, artist

Panel-Rationale: The panel explores the role of memory work in current political conflicts, protest movements, and social unrest that become increasingly conducted and communicated through connective and ubiquitous media. It contributes to the conference's overall theme and the section's focus area on Social Media, Activism and Social Change by assembling an array of both scholarship and practical reflection on the ways in which mediated practices and representations of past beliefs, tactics, bonds, or experiences come to play a role in times of struggle so to remember past or to constitute novel conflicts. It does so with an interest in the production and circulation of memories for protest via digitally networked technologies. Conceptually, the papers share the idea that coming to terms with challenging instances of public life is essential both in the present and in the future. More specifically, as the theoretically oriented Paper #1 sets out, the panel focuses on the relation between retrospective memories and the prospective employment of memories of conflict and disrupted communities in an increasingly mediated world. Its empirically-based Papers #2 to #5 deal with diverse locales as well as political, social, economic, or environmental contexts in considering collective media-related approaches of coping with and making sense of things past while accomplishing the present and projecting the future. Common threads, which run through all papers, are, first, a shared interest in times of conflict and crisis that, on the one hand, demand resolution and recovery and which, on the other, often come with the chance to review and revise old and new ways of living. Second, the contributions investigate the projective use of past feelings, ideas, relations, or strategies. Third, acknowledging the 'mediation of everything', they focus on the role of digital and connective media in order to renegotiate , revitalize, and rethink communities. By bringing together cognate inquiries, the panel seeks to advance understanding of the moving relationship of memories and media in troubled times. For one, the panel considers how the presence of conflict can come to bear upon memories of things past. Hence it asks: What is remembered in conflict and what is remembered of conflict? How are memories

This roundtable brings together a group of academics and artists working throughout Europe to discuss the question of memory in theoretical and artistic contexts at a historical moment highly preoccupied with acts of commemoration and moving memory.

Memory Studies, 2019

Jelena Tosic and Monika Palmberger