The keynote lecture by Elzbieta Matynia, "Simulacra of Memory: Between Erasure and Reactivation" on April 16, is part of the 2026 NSSR Festival of Ideas
The conference “Routes and Roots: Migration, Memory, Transnationality” invites scholars to explore the dynamic interplay between movement and remembrance. Its central theme asks how migration, displacement, and transnational mobility reshape both the routes through which memories travel and the roots that anchor identities across shifting geographies (Gilroy 1993); Alongside migrant and diasporic perspectives, the conference foregrounds indigenous and host communities’ approaches to memory, land, and mobility seeking to understand how their claims to place and knowledge intersect with, contest, and reframe histories of transoceanic migration and displacement (DeLoughrey 2007).
The conference seeks to illuminate how memories circulate across borders, generations, and media, and how migrants, refugees, and displaced communities produce, contest, and reimagine both space and memory.
In this context, “travelling memory” (Erll 2011) offers a useful lens for understanding how remembrance moves and changes. It conceptualizes remembering as a mobile and transformative process that operates through people, media, objects, practices, and narrative forms. Rather than treating memory as a stable transmission, we emphasize its dynamic reconfiguration across space and time. This dimension of memory highlights its capacity to mutate, hybridize, and translate as it circulates through migration, institutions, and cultural exchange.
Building on this perspective, the notion of transnational memory foregrounds the broader relational fields within which such movements unfold, highlighting interaction, friction, and exchange as remembrance develops along non-linear, multidirectional, and often contradictory trajectories. The “transnational turn” in memory studies (De Cesari & Rigney, 2014) rethinks the relationship between memory and mobility beyond “methodological nationalism,” examining how Memory today increasingly operates through globalized media, migration, and cultural flows that go beyond the nation-state’s boundaries as the primary landscape of collective remembrance.
At the same time, Memory remains deeply entangled in the histories of colonialism, nationalism, and post-socialist transformations, as well as in the neo-imperial aspirations and populist turns of our time.
The conference thus aims to advance discussions on the multidirectional, relational, and contested circulation of memory across migrations, diasporas, social movements, and cultural flows.
The conference includes contributions that engage with the following interrelated questions:
- How do movement, migration, displacement, and exile reshape identities and senses of belonging across places and generations?
- How do migrants, refugees, and diasporic groups negotiate between “home” and “host” memory cultures and regimes, and how are longings for return and nostalgia socially and politically mobilized?
- How are borders, transit zones, detention sites, and regimes of mobility remembered, and how do narratives of violence, exclusion, crossing, and survival shape collective memory?
- How do memories travel through people, media, objects, practices, and forms, and how does their movement generate transformation, hybridity, and new configurations of meaning across cultures and places?
- In what ways are migration, movement, and identity intertwined within transnational memory cultures marked by flow, hybridity, friction, contestation, and multidirectionality?
- What new mnemonic forms, archives, and practices emerge through diasporic and displacement experiences, including oral histories, community archives, digital media, and everyday acts of home-making?
- How do indigenous and host communities’ memories and concepts of land and sea interact with immigrant and diasporic imaginaries, and how does this interplay challenge colonial narratives that separate rooted indigeneity from representations of movement and mobility?
This conference is dedicated to Professor Elzbieta Matynia, in recognition of her longstanding contributions to the Memory Studies Network (MSN) and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research.
Presented by The Memory Studies Network (MSN) of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research.
Speakers:
Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz (UCL Social Research Institute), Translocal Civic Ecosystems: Ukrainian Migrant Entrepreneurship and Belonging in Poland, Germany, and the UK
Victor D. Borja (The New School for Social Research), Home Away from Home: Ecuadorian Diaspora, Fútbol, and Transnational Belonging in the 2026 World Cup
Kaye Yuvallos (Parsons School of Design), A Manual on How to Pack and Send a Balikbayan Box
Chair: Everita Silina (Assistant Professor of International Affairs; Chair and Departmental Faculty Advisor of Global Studies)
Speakers:
Karolina Koziura (University of Toronto), Migrating Memory, Diasporic Counter-Archives, and Transnational Reckoning with Repressed Past
Sameer Karim Jamal (The New School for Social Research), Aphasia and Memory: Deconstructing Asian-African Race Relations Through Tanzania's Unsettled Archives
Chair: Benoit Challand (Professor and Chair of Sociology, The New School for Social Research)
Elzbieta Matynia, Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS)
This event is part of the New School for Social Research Festival of Ideas.
Speakers:
Lala Pop (The New School for Social Research), Home as Heterotopia: ‘Other Places’ in Return Migration on the EU Semi-Periphery (On Zoom)
Agnes Ciemny (The New School for Social Research), Ovo Je Tuzla – This is Tuzla: Labor, Nation, and Collective Memory in a Bosnian City
Emina Zoletic (University of Warsaw, Poland), Remembering Across Borders: Bosnian Diaspora, Postmemory, and the Politics of Transmission (On Zoom)
Chair: Małgorzata Bakalarz-Duverger (Parsons School of Design)
Speakers:
Malkhaz Toria (The New School for Social Research), “Indigenous” and “Migrant”: Historiography, Memory, and the Georgian–Abkhaz Rivalry in the Soviet Riviera
Yoshie Kawado (Stony Brook University), Transnational Feminist Memory; A novel as a Catalyst of Social Imaginary between Korean and Japanese Women
Eunah Lee (St. Joseph’s University, New York), Decolonial Female Subjectivity in Park Soo-Nam's filmmaking
Chair: Jonathan Bach (Professor of Global Studies, The New School)
Speakers:
Małgorzata Bakalarz-Duverger (Parsons School of Design), Memory, Identity, and Cultural Participation: Ukrainian and Belarusian Refugee Children in Warsaw
Alex Rossen (The New School for Public Engagement), Painted Legacies and Sketched-Out Dreams
Hind B. Wright (The New School for Social Research), The Roots of a French Political Paradox
Chair: Jack Jin Gary Lee (Assistant Professor of Sociology, New School for Social Research)
When the Past Returns: Closing Reflections: with Senior Scholars of TCDS and the Memory Studies Network
Speakers:
Judith Friedlander (Professor of Anthropology, Emerita, Hunter College (CUNY)), The New School on the Edge of the Precipice: Then and Now
Irena Grudzińska-Gross (scholar and writer), Constant Displacement. Jewish Intellectuals in the 20th century
Irit Dekel (Assistant Professor, Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington), Ever again: the Transnational Routes of Memory as an Imperative
William Hirst (Malcolm B. Smith Professor and Chair of Psychology (CSD), The New School for Social Research), Breaking down Silos in Memory Studies: A recent Adventure with Astrid Erll
Moderated by: Malkhaz Toria (The New School for Social Research)
Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS).
I am a sociologist and historian of ideas, and my work at the crossroads of political and cultural sociology aims to illuminate how dramatic shifts in past and present social imaginaries shape and furnish our future at the local, national, and transregional levels.
At the center of my interests is the state of today’s democracy, which – while still aspirational – has been failing large segments of citizenry whether in the United States, East and Central Europe, or Sub-Saharan Africa. My research explores peaceful transitions to democratic order in various parts of the world, gender equality and democracy, and the challenges faced by democracies that have emerged with a legacy of violence.
My early book, "Grappling with Democracy: Deliberations on Post-communist Societies (1990-1995)" (1996) is a rare document of semi-clandestine debates on building a democratic order by dissident intellectuals in the countries of the newly defunct Soviet bloc. "Performative Democracy" (2009) examines a potential in political life that easily eludes theorists – the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens – and identifies the conditions for civic performativity in public life. "An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik" is a discussion between two iconic dissidents of Eastern Europe, Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, on the precariousness of democracy and early signs of its retreat. The book was listed among the eight Times Higher Education Books of 2014. The essays "How to Kill a Democracy" (2019), and "Is Liberal Democracy Already History?" discuss further democratic retreat and decline. In my research and teaching I often explore the arts as a site of social reflection, knowledge, and civic agency (“1989 and the Politics of Democratic Performativity” in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society), “Architectures of Gender,” “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” “The Promise of Active Freedom,” “Tribute to a Bridge,” and “Democracy’s Endgame?”). I am currently working on a book, “Democracy After Violence.”
I received my MA in literature and philosophy and PhD in sociology from Warsaw University, and came to the United States for post-doctoral studies at the New School’s Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. Soon after I arrived in NYC, the Polish government imposed martial law upon a society that 16 months earlier had organized the Independent and Self-governing Trade Union Solidarity, a workers-led movement unique in the Soviet Bloc that ultimately launched a long-running rights revolution throughout the region. Unable to go back to Poland under martial law, I taught at Bard and Sarah Lawrence Colleges and was then offered a junior position at The New School for Social Research.
As head of TCDS, I developed international fellowship programs in critical studies of democracy and launched the Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes open to civic-minded junior scholars for rigorous cross-cultural study on the critical issues facing today’s world (see a one-minute video-lecture here). I am a member of the editorial board of the Social Research International Journal. And am honored to have recently received the 2023 Courage in Public Scholarship Award, established in 2014 by the NSSR/Europe Collective (view a short intro video from the ceremony here.)
The Memory Studies Network at the New School is based at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) under the auspices of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). It was launched more than a decade ago by a cohort of graduate students. The conferences they organized over time that brought together leading scholars in social, cultural, and public memory across the disciplines, the fellowship programs, and finally an array of outstanding dissertations, made the New School a recognized site of Memory Studies, and one that contributed to shaping and establishing it as a field of study in the United States.
We work closely with interested graduate students, faculty, and our alumni to create a dynamic working hub, both intellectually inspiring and collegially supportive, to share the initial ideas, works-in-progress, research proposals, conference papers, dissertation chapters, and book manuscripts.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies: TCDS’s transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after the unrest of 1968. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East European literature and history at several universities and was 2018 Fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation. Her books include “Great Carousel, Biography of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski,” 2025, “Miłosz and the Long Shadow of War,” 2020, “Golden Harvest” (with Jan T. Gross), 2012; “Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets," 2009; and “The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination,” 1995.
Irit Dekel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Borns Jewish
Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. She earned her PhD in Sociology
from the New School for Social Research. Her first book Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (developed from the dissertation written at the NSSR and published by Palgrave in 2013. Dekel published on Philosemitism in Contemporary German Media in Media Culture and Society (2022). Her article “Public appearance and witnessing in two Berlin migrant activist groups” appeared in 2025 in Memory Studies Journal. She co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (2023). Dekel second book Witnessing Positions: Jews, Memories and Minorities in Contemporary Germany is forthcoming in January 2027 with Indiana University Press.
Irit’s research areas include cultural memory in contemporary Germany; migration, sociology of media, ethnic and racial inequality and museums.
Judith Friedlander served as Dean of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science (now NSSR) at The New School from 1993-2000, during which time she also occupied the Walter A. Eberstadt Chair of Anthropology. Friedlander has written extensively on questions of ethnic identity among indigenous peasants in Mexico and Jewish intellectuals in France and the United States. She has also contributed to debates about feminism and gender theory. Among her publications, she is the author of Being Indian in Hueyapan, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968, and A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile.
