1440 - Collective Memory

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

The interdisciplinary field of collective memory studies has produced important analyses of the ways in which societies remember, memorialize, and come to terms with disturbing events in different countries’ histories. Genocide, torture, forced disappearance of persons, racially-motivated crimes, and other human rights violations are among the issues that have been denied, silenced, or forgotten by sectors of society, even as others push to “never again” repeat such occurrences and strive to build collective memory toward that end. This session features sociological works on collective memory, including memories linked to nationalism and national history, knowledge disputes around mass social suffering, the consumption of memories as a form of denial and diversion, and mnemonic activism as a cause and result of commemoration. The panel covers collective memory issues in diverse national contexts including China, Ukraine, Israel, the United States, and countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Sub Unit

• Collective Memory

Session Organizer

• Barbara Sutton, University at Albany, SUNY

Presider

• Susan C. Pearce, East Carolina University

Individual Presentations

• Consuming a Difficult Past Unapproved: Chairman Mao as Commodity - Licheng Qian, Zhejiang University

• Difficult Pasts and Joyful Memories: Collective Memory of Joy in History Textbooks in the Former Yugoslavia - Tamara Pavasovic Trost, University of Ljubljana

• The Contested Politics of Knowledge of Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33. - Karolina Koziura, The New School

• The Transformative Capacity of Commemoration: Collective Identity, Intergroup Contact, and Sustained Mnmemonic Activism - Claire Whitlinger, Furman University

• We Hereby Neglect: The Israeli Hall of Independence and the Social Texture of Memory - Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Hebrew University of Jerusalem