Definitions of memory in each of this summer’s study circles:
Circle 1: Understanding Migration in Nordic and Baltic Countries
“Memory is tied to history and identity. It affects integration and makes boundaries pores. It’s at the core of a shared experience of generations throughout” time and through storytelling”.
Key words: Representation, transnationalism, identity, multilingualism
Circle 2: Appearances of the Political
“Memory is a tool to understand our own reality. It’s also a result of your personal experience that can be lead by ideology. We understand collective memory as something ideological.”
Key words: Rationality, legacy, experience, patterns
Circle 3: Feminist Philosophy: Time, History and the Transformation of Thought
“Memory is embodiment. It’s what we remember and not always conscious (it is actually often unconscious). It can affect the way we read texts and how we write them, as well as who we are.”
Key words: embodiment, affect, empathy, solidarity and praxis of theory
Circle 4: Narrative and Memory: Ethics, Aesthetics and Memory
“Memory and narration are interchangeable. A way of narrating ones thoughts and past experiences.”
Key words: imagination, sympathy, compassion, narration
Circle 5: Patterns of Dysfunction in Contemporary Democracies; Impacts on Human Rights and Governance
“Memories change our identity. They can be associations with our childhood. They are also what we’re taught to be our history. But sometimes histories can be lost”.
Key words: citizenship, community, politics, human rights
Circle 6: Critique in the Age of Populism
“Memory is a carefully curated memory. It’s a construction of the past and an interpretation. In times of populism, memory is intrinsically linked to the irrational”.
Key words: critique, freedom, reason, post-truth,
Circle 7: Practicing Communities: Transformative societal strategies of artistic research
“Memory can mean re-tracing. It can mean going through left over after the creation of a filming it. There’s a difference between re-enactment and re-tracing. Between documentation and embodied forms of memory, between habitus and the instilling of memories in the body. It can also be emotional states and affect”.
Key words: Practice, contemplation, history, ancestry, traditions
Circle 8: Learning and Bildung in Times of Globalisation
Memory as the narrative in the learning and building memories. But it can also be what programmes how we communicate. Memory is what is precious to us and what we choose to select.
Key words: Meta-education, cultivation, bildung, interdisciplinary
Interviews made by Sara Ibáñez O’Donnell
Photo by Warren Enström