300496 Theory Class: Memory, Politics, Activism (S) (SoSe 2023)

As the “memory boom” has become a defining feature of (late)modern societies, scholarly and public attention has increasingly turned to examining its social, political and cultural conditions, actors and consequences . Various academic disciplines engage with memory phenomena in hugely diverse theoretical and empirical ways. After a long focus on cultures, modes and dynamics of remembering in social as well as individual perspectives, and closely tied to experiences of extreme violence and genocides, recent scholarship increasingly focuses on the politics of memory and memory activism (as well as memories of activism) and their societal contexts.
The Theory Class will focus on such recent theories and debates regarding memory activism and memory politics in a transnational perspective. We will read a selection of canonical texts from the last decades in memory studies and zoom in on the current conceptual and empirical scholarship on memory activism – mainly from the fields of sociology, political science, history and literary studies. We will invite two senior scholars who have shaped the field in fundamental ways for in-depth discussions of their respective works.

The Theory Class will take place in two blocks: one of the blocks (1-6pm) will take place on 2 June with guest speaker Prof. Ann Rigney (University of Utrecht). The other block will take place on 30 June with guest speaker Prof. Jeffrey Olick. In addition, there will be an introductory meeting on 20 April (10-12am).

Bibliography

Suggested Readings:

The Collective Memory Reader, edited by Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (2011)
Patrick H. Hutton, The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing (2016)
Ann Rigney, Remembering Hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic, in: Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698018771869.
Jenny Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany (2017).