More-than-human memory

Description

Convenors

Yael Navaro, University of Cambridge

Speakers

• Alice von Bieberstein, Humboldt University
• Zerrin Özlem Biner, University of Kent, Canterbury
• Tianna Bruno, University of Texas, Austin
• Liana Chua, University of Cambridge
• Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis
• Zoe Crossland, Columbia University
• Ewa Domanska, Adam Mickiewicz University
• Zuzanna Dziuban, Austrian Academy of Sciences
• Safet Hadzimuhamedovic, University of Cambridge
• Hannah Knox, University College London
• Nayanika Mathur, University of Oxford
• Laura Ogden, Dartmouth College 
• Daniel Ruiz Serna, University of British Columbia 
• Ruba Salih, University of Bologna
• Anand Vivek Taneja, Vanderbilt University
• Umut Yıldırım, University of Geneva

Summary

Memory has been mostly theorised through human-centred associations, via studies of the psyche, subjectivity and interiority, on the one hand, and of cultural production, mediation, and representation, on the other. Most studies in this vein have approached memory as socially or culturally constructed, and as a reflection of the human imagination. This conference opens the field of memory studies to ‘more-than-human’ dimensions, attending especially to sites of genocide and ecocide. Can memory be studied as having ‘other-than-human’ registers in spaces where people have been targeted with mass violence and annihilation? Do natural forms have memory? Do animals? Can the environment be read as having a sort of ‘memory’? Can trees? a mountain? the sea? Might there be cosmological forms of memory? Do sacred sites harbour memory, or is memory necessarily secular? And how do ‘non-human’ entities (such as objects and spaces) retain memory?

This event will bring anthropologists, archaeologists and environmental historians into an interdisciplinary conversation about memory’s beyond human-centred and further than anthropocentric whereabouts. Scholars of genocide will be in conversation with scholars of the anthropocene to explore the potentially transformative social and political possibilities of ‘more-than-human memory.’

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