The Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Group at The New School for Social Research (NSSR).
Recognizing the global shift to populist politics, the re-emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the ongoing war conducted by Russia against Ukraine, we are proposing a theme that spotlights the striking instrumentalization of memory and unmasks the logic of power relations. Examples of “using and abusing the past” are visible in many cases: the unprecedented proliferation and cultivation of biopolitics during the COVID-19 pandemic; the national populist rhetoric against migrants in Trump’s USA or Orban’s Hungary; the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the full out war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; the attack on democracy and the rise of illiberal regimes elsewhere from Bolsonaro’s Brazil to Modi’s India. All these and other profoundly unsettling political and social events illuminate “the power of memory” and “the power over memory” (Müller 2002) in our time of political and social upheavals and cataclysms.
Please see the full program below.
Presented by The Memory Studies Group at The New School for Social Research and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies.
Effective February 23, 2023, event guests and/or visitors to the New School are no longer required to provide proof of up-to-date vaccination or negative result from a PCR test and do not need to use the CLEAR app to present their vaccination status.
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New School students seeking accommodations should contact the Student Disability Services office at studentdisability@newschool.edu.
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Moderator – Nikola Ksiazek, NSSR politics
Xavier Moyssén Álvarez, NSSR Sociology
Mexico’s Four Transformations and the Weaponization of Memory in Populist Discourse: a Political Semiosis Approach
Adam Koehler Brown, NSSR Sociology
Remembering an Attack on Democracy: The January 6th Committee Public Hearings as Collective Memory
Benjamin Serra, NSSR Politics
Did January 6th Work?
Malkhaz Toria, NSSR sociology
The Instrumentalization of Medieval Tropes in Georgian Nationalism and Memory Politics
Moderator – Akansha Jha, NSSR Sociology
Maia Araviashvili, Fulbright Visitng scholar at NSSR
Social Media Platforms as Sites of Memory and Identity Production among Georgian Immigrants in NYC
Silvana Alvarez Basto, NSSR Liberal Studies alumna
The Bolivarian vera effigie the Politicization of Collective Memory in Venezuela
Miguel Díaz-Cervantes, NSSR Sociology
Haunted House Lope de Vega 881 – Contending memories of the rupture of the Mexican State and the Guadalajara Cartel
Anthony Deen, Associate professor, Parsons School of Art, Media and Technology
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: the Japanization of Japan
Keynote Lecture
Robin Wagner-Pacifici, University Professor, NSSR
Weaponization through Domestication: Events and Non-events in our Short Term Memory
With Introductory Remarks by
Jeffrey Olick - Professor, University of Virginia
Roundtable
Moderator - Malkhaz Toria, NSSR Sociology
Jeffry Goldfarb - Professor Emeritus, NSSR
Elzbieta Matynia - Professor, NSSR
Jeffrey Olick - Professor, University of Virginia
Amy Sodaro - Associate Professor, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Robin Wagner-Pacifici is a University Professor affiliated with the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of a number of books, most recently What is an Event? (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
The Memory Studies Group 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.
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.
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Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology Emeritus at The New School for Social Research and Senior Fellow at the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies.
He is the author of dozens of articles and eight books, including Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power, The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times and Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society. He is the founder of the online magazine Public Seminar and the convener of The Democracy Seminar, first developed in the 1980s as an exchange between oppositionist groups in Central Europe and the United States, and in 2018 reconvened as a “World Wide Committee of Democratic Correspondence.”
Goldfarb lived in Poland in 1973-4 doing the research for his dissertation on Polish Student Theater. He collaborated with the democratic opposition before Solidarnosc and worked with Solidarnosc both above and below ground in the 1980s. Since 1989, he has annually returned to Poland to teach in an institute on Democracy and Diversity. For his work in Poland, he received the Solidarity Medal, presented by former President Lech Walesa, on behalf of the Polish government, in recognition of support for Solidarity, commemorating its 25th anniversary, September 28, 2005, and the Medal of Gratitude, from the European Solidarity Centre, Gdansk, Poland, 2012.
Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Her research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transformations, gender and democracy, the borderlands of a shared Europe, and more recently on the challenges faced by democracies emerging with a legacy of violence.
Amy Sodaro is Associate Professor of Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her research focuses on memory and memorialization of violence and atrocity. She has published chapters and articles on memorial museums, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the House of Terror in Budapest, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda and the 9/11 Museum. She is co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).
