A day of presentations and discussion featuring researchers from The Uses of the Past Research Group at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton.

Boardroom M2, Grand Parade site, University of Brighton,

Tuesday 26 June 2018, 9.30 am–5.45 pm

Themes to be explored include: legacies, reparations, contestations and transformations of ‘the past’ in post-war, post-conflict, post-colonial, post-industrial, post-revolutionary cultures; colonial, postcolonial, transnational and migrant histories, memories and identities; complex temporalities and spatiality; the politics of history and memory and the problem of ‘the past’ in peacebuilding and conflict transformation; the cultural politics of ‘the past’ in narrative, landscape and material culture; questions of theory and method in studying memories, representations, uses, erasures, silences, residues, traces, lacunae of ‘the past’ in relation to the present and future.

This event is part of a 3-day workshopexploring possibilities and making plans for collaboration between the two research groups based on our common aims, ethos and interdisciplinary research interests in theory and practice in memory studies, museology, critical heritage studies, and the cultural politics of history, memory and temporality.

9.00 Registration

9.30 Welcome and introduction to the day

9.45–11.15 Panel 1: Postcolonial histories and memories

Dr Anita Rupprecht (Brighton), ‘Reparative histories: Tracing narratives of Black resistance and White entitlement’

Jacco Visser (Aarhus), ‘ “We are the Freedom Fighters’: The transgenerational transmission of public memory of the Bangladesh War in London’

Dr Dora Carpenter-Latiri (Brighton), ‘Photographic representations of Tunisian women (1940s to present):From family archive to fieldwork’

11.15–11.45 coffee break

11.45–1.15 Panel 2: Rethinking temporalities, ‘post-revolutionary’, ‘post-communist’, ‘post-conflict’

Dr Leila Dawney (Brighton), ‘Fade to white: On endurance, care and the micropolitics of abandonment in a decommissioning nuclear town’

Annemarie Majlund Jensen (Aarhus), ‘Occupation and other prisms: Employing multiple perspectives on the conditioning of conflict and post-conflict experience’.

Dr Thomas Carter (Brighton), ‘Everyday life, urban spatiality and nonlinear time in revolutionary society’

1.15–2.15 Lunch(provided)

2.15–3.45 Panel 3: The problem of ‘the past’ in peace building and conflict transformation

Andrea García González (Brighton), ‘Exploring the concept of “practices of peace” as a feminist contribution to peace and conflict studies’

Dr Sara Dybris McQuaid (Aarhus), ‘Administrations of memory: Towards a transnational and digital research agenda in peace building processes’

Prof. Graham Dawson (Brighton), ‘Reparative remembering, cross-community history-making and the legacies of the Northern Irish conflict on West Belfast interfaces’

3.45–4.15 Tea break

4.15–5.45 Panel 4: The cultural politics of history and memory

Lucy Newby (Brighton), ‘Unsettling the “speakable” and the “hearable”: Exploring narrative defiance inaccounts of Belfast youth experience during the Northern Irish “Troubles” ’

Gari Gomez Alfaro (Brighton), ‘Walter Benjamin in Fortress Europe: Memory, borders and the landscape of the disappeared’

Dr Laura McAtackney (Aarhus), ‘Meaningful memory of women: Public memory, murals and material culture in contemporary Ireland’.

5.45 End and drinks