This call for papers is also available to download as a PDF.
Historical narratives and collective memories are important requirements or components that help constitute a nation and create group solidarity and cohesion. Memory, in the form of historical events, traditions, and cultural symbols is well embedded in the language of nations and nationalism. As a perpetually actual phenomenon, memory binds remembering and forgetting as two constitutive categories. This enables categories of nation and national identities to be imagined and reimagined on the bases of present-day requirements. Considering its persistence as a crucial element of the theoretical and discursive explorations of nationalism, memory engenders numerous opportunities to challenge existing historical narratives while accentuating the plurality of historical interpretations.
This conference explores the multifaceted relationship between nationalism and memory to better understand the continuously changing embodiments of national identification shaped by an increasingly contested and fragmented discourse on how and what nations (should) remember. By exploring the versatility of the nationalist rhetoric in shaping collective identities, the converging of nationalism and memory offers a rich conceptual and empirical terrain for analysing the public uses of history, past and present myth-making processes, and the overall growing enthusiasm for recovering national pasts that characterises almost all contemporary societies and nations.
Thus, along with questions which speak more closely to memory as a crucial category in nationalism’s discursive repertoire, this conference is also interested in questions that interrogate the relationship between nations and heritage culture in its everyday manifestations. The conference is intended to cover cases worldwide and welcomes papers based on different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. Considering the interdisciplinary character of both nationalism and memory studies, we invite contributions from various disciplines and fields, such as sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, political science, political theory, cultural studies, education, media and communication studies, museum studies, critical race studies, philosophy, and law.
Themes
Themes may include, but are not limited to:
Nationalism, Memory, and History
Forgetting and Remembering
Mythmaking Process and Mnemonic Actors
Education and Remembrance
Individual vs Collective Memory
National Days and Commemoration
National Museums and Memory
National Memory, Gender, and Race
Transnational Memory
Nationalism, Heritage, and Representation
Historical Ethnosymbolism
Nationalism and (Invented) Traditions
National Memory and Reconciliation
National Memorials and Statues
Nationalism and Memory in the Age of Digitalisation
National Trauma, Victimhood, and Reconciliation
Contested Myths and Memories
National and International Institutions of Memory
