UU Networkshop: Un/forgetting the Past

To continue building an interdisciplinary network among colleagues researching memory and heritage at Utrecht University we invite you to a one-day workshop on 10 December 2024, 09.30-17.00h.

Memory is always selective. Especially today, we experience the push and pull between an excess of the past made present in society and the desire to forget on the one hand, and on the other the imperative to remember. In this workshop we will focus on the relationship between memory and forgetting, taking forgetting (erasure, amnesia, displacement, repression, annulment, obsolescence, etc.) as a defining mode of our relationship with the past, rather than as memory’s silent partner. Scholars of multiple disciplines, including memory and heritage studies, have extensively discussed the selectiveness in representations of the past, which are always changing, open to contestation, societal use and abuse, subject to moral framings, and as such highly political. Some pasts have been publicly recognised, amplified, commemorated, and glorified, while others have been actively redacted or suppressed. This workshop aims at the exploration of such dynamic processes of un/forgetting. We are interested in historical and contemporary practices of un/forgetting across social groups, time periods, and different places around the world. We hope to explore the selective practices of historical consciousness constituent to the collective identities of ‘memory communities’ at multiple social levels. In other words: what are the actors, intentions, practices, and effects in processes of selecting the past?

Precise programme TBA.