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MEMORY ECONOMIES: A Public Symposium
Date and time
Location
Room 326, Senate Chambers
Old Arts Building and Convocation Hall University of Alberta Edmonton, Traditional Territory of the Treaty 6 Peoples, AB T6G 25E CanadaDescription
“Memory Economies: Exploring economies of memory in an age of global capitalism” A two-day public symposium
25–26 May 2016, at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
The symposium is organized by Professors Terri Tomsky (English & Film Studies) and Susanne Luhmann (Women’s & Gender Studies). It brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to examine the complex, and so far rarely examined, relationship between memory and economy.
Memory, and more precisely cultural memory, refers to representations and discourses that reconfigure the past, and mostly, those pasts that are contested or traumatic. Cultural memory scholars turn to objects, images, and representations as “technologies of memory” through which “memories are shared, produced, and given meaning” (Sturken 1997) to understand how memory communities exist in relation to hegemonic cultures of forgetting (Assmann and Conrad 2010; LaCapra 2001; Levy and Sznaider 2005; Rothberg 2009). For scholars in the field, cultural memory is a valuable resource: it not only provides the basis for both collective and individual identity, but it also holds significant ramifications for societies, providing “the content and impetus of political and moral claims” (Ball 2000). In turn, the notion of economy relates to the management of resources: the organization and administration of perceived assets, including their distribution, trade, and consumption – significant aspects that have not yet been sufficiently theorized within cultural memory studies.
This symposium sets out to explore the economies of memory: the way institutions, communities, agents, and special interest groups manage, mediate, and re-value memory.
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For more details, including our workshop's schedule, please visit our website at https://memoryeconomies.com.