Pathways to post-conflict remembrance - Introduction
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2021-03-01

We are currently living in a time where past conflicts are lavishly commemorated, contemporary ones being followed on the world stage, while future ones dreaded with fear. Across the world, past and present conflicts and their heritages are being instrumentalized for the formation of national identities, as well as patriotic and nationalistic sentiments, and therefore holding a crucial role in ongoing shifts and changes of contemporary politics.During this session we seek papers from different social and historical contexts, which offer theoretical frameworks and/or case study approaches to various pathways of remembering and commemorating conflicts between 19th and 21st century, both in private and public domains.
Understanding memory as a contested process, we aim to examine the political, moral and ethical dynamics of post-conflict remembrance through institutional and individual efforts. The physicality/tangibility of remembrance through (for example) memorabilia, art, fashion, literature, memorials and monuments, private and public museum displays, often appears to have been the focus of various commemorative efforts and academic works. However, during this session we also invite papers exploring intangible aspects of remembrance through sound, music, oral histories and ethnographies. This will give us the opportunity to discuss and compare different disciplinary approaches and boundaries within the field of conflict memory. We are particularly interested in papers that explore one or more of the following topics:

Commemorations and politics
Ownership of the past
Commemoration and identity
Morality of remembrance
Physicality of commemoration

LUISA NIENHAUS, UCL INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY; LISHENG ZHANG, UCL