Beyond Nostalgia and Ruin: Mnemonic Emotion Narratives and the Postindustrial Memoryscape of Post-Socialist Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

What happens when memories of working in industry are filtered through the fractured landscape of post-socialist transition? Poland and Lithuania offer a compelling comparison. Although both countries underwent decline of industry, Poland’s labor movement remains central to national memory, whereas Lithuania’s industrial past is marginal, entangled with continuous desovietization process. Through close readings of biographical interviews, museum exhibitions, and activist interventions, we illuminate the emotional infrastructure of post-socialist industrial memory. The panel examines what narratives about socialism and capitalism these memories carry and how they challenge or reinforce dominant political narratives. Rather than discussing nostalgia and trauma, it asks: how do emotions such as pride, resentment, guilt and shame relate to what is remembered, institutionalised or forgotten? Who has the right to feel, who has the right to remember and whose emotions are considered legitimate?
We introduce the concept of mnemonic emotion narratives--stories that encode moral evaluations of the past through emotional expression. By juxtaposing communicative memory (oral histories of workers) with cultural memory (museum exhibitions, grassroots heritage projects), we reveal the tensions between lived experience and its institutional framing. The panel is part of the project MEPOST Remembering (De)industrialization: Moral Emotions in the Memory of Post-Socialist Transformation in Lithuania and Poland funded by National Science Center in Poland and Lithuanian Research Council 2025-2028.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Joanna Wawrzyniak, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• Mnemonic Emotion Narratives: A Conceptual Framework - Joanna Wawrzyniak, U of Warsaw (Poland); Jogile Ulinskaite, Vilnius U (Lithuania)

• Something to be Proud of: The Emotion of Pride in Memories of Post-Socialist (De)Industrialization in Lithuania - Aušra Teleišė, Vilnius U (Lithuania)

• Exhibiting Absence: The Museumification of (De-)Industrialization and Its Emotional Politics - Rimante Jaugaite, U of Warsaw (Poland)

Discussant

• Kateřina Králová, Inst of Ethnology CAS (Czech Republic)

Session Manager

• Anastasia Felcher, Central European U Austria