The politics of memory practices: Making the past present in contemporary education, Feb 21-24

The last decade has witnessed a profound change in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies.  Instead of analysing representations of memory in different media, researchers are increasingly paying attention to memory practices, i.e. how people in various sites and contexts negotiate the meanings they ascribe to the past. Collective memory (or: cultural memory, social memory, connected memory, prosthetic memory, multidirectional memory, tangled memory, travelling memory) is thus seen as a site of political contestation, subject formation, ideological struggle, knowledge production and community-building.

This symposium aims to explore the dynamics of these processes with a special focus on schools and other sites of education. We take a cultural politics approach to education, seeing schools as places where young people spend much of their waking lives, where different generations meet, where students encounter hegemonic discourse, and where relations of authority and hierarchy are (re)produced, negotiated and interrupted.