Opening Roundtable “Practising Memory in Times of Crisis”

Memory is not a static record of the past but a dynamic process, constantly reshaped by present-day concerns, power structures, and competing interests. How we remember is determined as much by contemporary realities as by historical events. Responsibility, on the other hand, signifies the obligation to answer for actions, inactions, decisions, and narratives—whether as individuals, groups, or societies. 

Since the late 1900s, the notion of a “duty to remember” has increasingly shaped public relations to the past. Originally tied to the commemoration of the First World War in Western Europe (“lest we forget”), the moral imperative to bear witness and prevent future horrors (“never again”) gained widespread prominence in the second half of the twentieth century in response to the Holocaust and political transitions in Latin America. 

Today, this moral imperative finds itself in a profound crisis as the memory of the Holocaust is being instrumentalized by Israel and its allies to justify the ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. Those who, in solidarity with Palestinian lives and in response to these acts of destruction and erasure, claim that “never again” means “never again for anyone” are silenced and accused of antisemitism. 

During this roundtable, we explore the connection between memory and responsibility – the central topic of the Mnemonics Summer School 2025 – in relation to the genocide in Gaza on the one hand, and the shrinking space for civil society and activism due to a global authoritarian backlash on the other. 

This conversation between memory scholars, artists and activists will address questions such as:

• How to explain and prevent the weaponization of memories of past atrocities to justify present day human rights violations? 

• What is the role of ‘memory activism’ in cultivating memory practices that embrace structural responsibility and foster global solidarity?

• How to dignify victims while at the same time integrating the complex memory of complicity and implication?

• What can be the role of academics, artists and activists in practicising memory in times of crisis?

Panel:

• Amani El Haddad (Gents Kunstenoverleg)
• Alaa Mahdi Kudaih (photographer and writer)
• Manoeuvre vzw 
• Pieter Lagrou (ULB)
• Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
• Michael Rothberg (UCLA)

Moderator: Eva Willems (UGent)

Atrium, Faculty Library of Arts and Philosophy, Rozier 44, 9000 Ghent

09-09-2025 18:45 - 20:30

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Keynote Lecture Carlos Fonseca “Theatres of Memory: From Testimonio to the Forensic Paradigm”

This talk explores the shift in Latin American cultural production from the testimonial mode of the 1980s to a contemporary forensic paradigm, examining how this transformation reconfigures the way historical memory is conceived and narrated in the wake of dictatorship, civil war, and structural violence. While testimonio once cantered the voice of the human witness as a vehicle for truth and political urgency, contemporary works increasingly turn to the material remnants of atrocity—bones, documents, ruins, archives—as privileged sources of historical meaning. Drawing on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Cristina Rivera Garza, Eyal Weizman, and Jacques Derrida, the talk argues that forensics emerges as a new cultural and epistemological modality: one that displaces humanist memory with posthuman remnants. Through an analysis of contemporary Latin American novels, films, and art pieces, the talk will examine how forensic fictions perform acts of exhumation, recontextualization, and narrative assembly. These works do not simply remember the past—they stage memory as an investigative practice, where the archive no longer signals foundational truth but instead operates as a fractured, ruinous terrain through which historical sense must be laboriously reconstructed.

Carlos Fonseca Suárez is a Puerto Rica-Costa Rican writer and scholar whose work explores the intersections of literature, history, and memory in Latin America. He is the author of three novels—Coronel Lágrimas, Museo animal, and Austral—as well as the critical monograph The Literature of Catastrophe: Nature, Disaster and Revolution in Latin America. In 2021, he was selected by Granta Magazine as one of their Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He was also chosen by Encyclopædia Britannica as part of their Young Shapers of the Future 20 Under 40 Initiative, as one of the top twenty young international authors. In 2024, he was awarded the Anna Seghers Prize in Germany. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and is currently a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he teaches Latin American literature and cultural theory. His recent research focuses on forensic aesthetics, postdictatorial fiction, and the material afterlives of memory in contemporary art and literature.

Teresazaal, Het Rustpunt, Burgstraat 110/116, 9000 Ghent

10-09-2025 09:45 - 11:00

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Keynote Lecture Sara Dybris McQuaid "Relocating Responsibility: Administrations of Memory in the Vernacular”

The term “administrations of memory” was originally coined to engage with memorialization from a governance perspective: to direct attention to the many composite ways in which memory becomes part of public policy and how particular policy processes co-produce effects and feedback far beyond representations of the past (McQuaid and Gensburger 2018, and forthcoming 2026). It goes without saying that questions of responsibility are also defined and redistributed in these generative processes.

In this talk, I will first introduce “administrations of memory” as a sensitizing concept, encouraging new ways to take on questions of memory and responsibility together. I will then use the transitional context of Northern Ireland to illustrate how transnational administrations, often fundamental to peace processes, are assembled and diffused on the ground. I will focus on a hyper-local case study in North Belfast, a former Carnegie Library, as a place where international, national and local peacebuilding agendas, regeneration policies and welfare provisions converge and diverge over time. The case illustrates the incremental disappearance of both responsibility and memory, when critical social infrastructures, such as libraries and youth services, are gradually decoupled from political authority and administration. Daylighting the blind spots produced by administrative retreat or redrawing of administrative boundaries then becomes a question of methodological responsibility for researchers: finding ways to piece together that which has been lost in transition. This is not merely a recuperative task but speaks directly to being able to grapple with more complex temporalities in transition and the different ways in which local spaces are incorporated in—and forgotten by—administrations of memory. In other words, a local approach can help “vernacularize” administrations of memory to show the different pathways through which particular spaces are drawn together in communities of memory and policy. This in turn opens up wider questions of reordering experience and relocating responsibility in ongoing peace processes.

Sara Dybris McQuaid is an associate professor at Aarhus University. She is a contemporary historian and political scientist who works mostly across the interdisciplinary fields of peace and conflict studies and memory studies. Her research pivots around how collectives remember, forget and archive their past, particularly as part of conflict and peacebuilding processes and in the context of the “post-conflict” period in Northern Ireland. She is currently on a “Carlsberg Monograph Fellowship” working on a book entitled Administrations of Memory and the Politics of the “Post-”: Northern Ireland 1994-2024. She teaches on the BA in Humanities and Conflict and the MA in Intercultural Studies at Aarhus University. She is a founding member of the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts at the University of Copenhagen and was a co-director of the working group “Transformations of Conflict” in the COST Action “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change” from 2021 to 2024.

Teresazaal, Het Rustpunt, Burgstraat 110/116, 9000 Ghent

11-09-2025 14:00 - 15:15

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Keynote Lecture Hanna Meretoja “Memory as Interpretation: The Approach of Narrative Hermeneutics”

This talk articulates how narrative hermeneutics approaches memory as an interpretative activity and practice. After a brief overview of how the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition of philosophy theorizes interpretation (“something as something”), I focus on how narrative hermeneutics conceptualizes narrative and memory as interpretative practices that are entangled with one another. Memory understood in terms of acts of interpretation is, to a large extent, narratively mediated, and it is hence important to understand how cultural narratives as models of sense-making function as vehicles of interpretation that participate in constituting mnemonic acts of interpretation.

Remembering is an activity that takes place in the present and is entwined with a narrative process of meaning-making that raises issues of collective responsibility. The process of reinterpreting the past is entangled with the process of constructing and negotiating our narrative identities in the present, that is, our storied sense of who we are, and this process necessarily has a futural dimension. It is part and parcel of refiguring who we are and who we want to be—as individuals and communities—and what lessons we choose to draw from the violent legacies that precede us.

This talk suggests that narrative hermeneutics offers resources for acknowledging the role of cultural narratives as sense-making models in mediating mnemonic acts of interpretation and for discussing issues of collective responsibility. It enables an analysis of how mnemonic acts participate in reinforcing and questioning culturally dominant ways of talking about the past in ways that are relevant for how we orient ourselves in the present and towards different futures. I suggest that one important way of taking responsibility for past histories of violence is to reflect on the implicit narratives we use and on how they may perpetuate structural violence and injustice. Through a brief discussion of the themes of memory, agency, and responsibility in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Heimsuchung (2008, Visitation), I elucidate how narrative fiction can provide valuable interpretative resources for such reflection.

Hanna Meretoja is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality, and Memory at the University of Turku (Finland). She runs the projects “Counter-Narratives of Cancer: Shaping Narrative Agency” (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2027) and “Narrative Agency Reading Group Model: Applications for Libraries, Schools, and Hospitals” (Research Council of Finland, 2025-2026). Her research is mainly in the fields of narrative studies, memory studies, and health humanities. Her monographs include The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford UP, 2018) and The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and she has co-edited The Use and Abuse of Stories: New Directions in Narrative Hermeneutics (Oxford UP, 2023), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (2020), Storytelling and Ethics: Literature, Visual Arts and the Power of Narrative (Routledge, 2018), and special issues of Memory Studies (“Cultural Memorial Forms,” 2021) and Poetics Today (“Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom,” 2022).

Teresazaal, Het Rustpunt, Burgstraat 110/116, 9000 Ghent

12-09-2025 09:00 - 10:15

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