Stefan Berger, Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum and Christian Koller, Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv, Zurich

Venue: Insitute for Social Movements, Bochum
Time: 16.-18.06.2020
Proposals by: 15.05.2019

The organizers are interested in papers who are willing to explore the relationship between collective / collected memories and social movements in the modern period from the 18th century to the present day. The organizers are hoping to bring into productive dialogue two fields of studies that are just beginning to explore possible synergies between them.

Dennis Bos’s book on the memory of the Paris Commune of 1871, Donatella della Porta’s and her collaborators’ book on memories and legacies in movements, Stefan Berger’s and Sean Scalmer’s forthcoming book on memory and social movements, Ann Rigney’s ERC project on memories of social movements all point to the fruitfulness of exploring how memory functions in relation to social movements. Furthermore, the increasing body of work on memory activism is also highlighting the strong relationship between the work of social movements and memorial landscapes.

Memory studies has so far concentrated massively on so-called traumatic memory that often had to do with national histories and memories and was often related to the history of wars and genocides. Social movement studies not only suffered from an over-concentration on so-called new social movements from the 1970s onwards, lacking a deeper historical perspective, its arsenal of medium-range theories were often informed more by social science theory than by theories from cultural studies. However, things have been changing for a number of years now and it seems to … read more and source (Web).