On December 21st, the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies has announced that Clara Vlessing, a member of the ReAct project team, has won first prize for her PhD thesis entitled “Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst”. Many congratulations to her and we look forward to seeing more…

This semester, our very own Dr. Susanne Knittel has been awarded an ERC grant for her project “Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination”. Many congratulations to her, and we wish her all the best with this exciting new opportunity!         About the Project The ongoing destruction of…

Speakers: Maria Grever (EUR / NL-Lab) and Ann Rigney (UU) Moderator: Pieter Huistra (UU) Please, register: huizinga@uu.nl   Both speakers are members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and participated in the KNAW committee “Controversial Monuments”.  On October 23, 2023, the committee presented the report Wankele Sokkels. Omstreden Monumenten in de Openbare Ruimte (Unstable Pedestals. Contested Monuments in Public Spaces)….

Monumental Matters: How do our national monuments reflect society? The International Heritage Cooperation programme of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) and the ErfgoedAcademie are organising a two-part online exchange titled “Monumental Matters: How do our National Monuments reflect society?”. Attending both sessions is encouraged. Each session will begin with a series of short…

On Thursday, November 23rd, the Cultural History Section of the Transcultural Connections Group will organize a workshop focused on exploring the similarities through space and time between practices, discourses, and images of iconoclasm, and the ways these connections can be further conceptualized today. The event will feature talks by several scholars, who engage with the…

Ann Rigney was part of the committee responsible for the report on “Contested Monuments” (in Dutch) for the KNAW. For more information, click here.     The KNAW report on the news: Meer aandacht nodig voor omstreden erfgoed: ‘Keuze doet recht aan de een, maar sluit tegelijkertijd anderen uit’ parool.nl · 23-10-2023  Bestuurders en beleidsmakers…

On September 9, 2021, Ann Rigney was invited to give a keynote lecture entitled “When Monuments Matter” at the European Heritage Heads Forum in Tallinn. For more information, click here.  

Sophie van den Elzen has been invited to talk with artist, writer and researcher Pieter Paul Pothoven as well as organizer, curator and teacher Katía Truijen to celebrate the International Institue of Social History’s acquisition of an antiracist archive, constructed in part by Pothoven in collaboration with activist group RaRa (Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action). For more…

Sophie van den Elzen has been invited to write a chapter on “Rebels” for the new Handbook on Transnational Periodical Research (2025), and will therefore speak and be present at the work-in-progress meetings that have been arranged by the European Society for Periodical Studies.   About the seminar series This series of work-in-progress sessions will…

Ann Rigney has been invited to participate in discussions about the future of democratic memory organised by the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union.   About the conference The European countries have set up a series of networks that support and encourage the involvement of spaces of memory and the creation of…

África López Zabalegui In 2021, for the 10th anniversary of the Indignados protest (most commonly known in Spain as 15M), the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid included part of the movement’s archive in its permanent exhibition. As I was spending my Christmas holidays back home in Madrid, I decided to visit it. The materials from…

With responses from:  Robert Hariman (Northwestern University) and Aidan McGarry (Loughborough University) Watch a recording of the book launch here. Social movements are not only remembered in personal experience, but also through cultural carriers that shape how later movements see themselves and are seen by others. The present collection zooms in on the role of…

Two members of the ReAct team, Duygu Erbil and Clara Vlessing, will be presenting their research at the eleventh Mnemonics Summer School”The Industry of Memory”, which will take place from 27-29 June at King’s College London and the Regent’s Street Campus of the University of Westminster. For more information about the summer school, click here….

ReAct has organized a panel for the last day of this year’s annual Memory Studies Association conference, which will take place in Newcastle from 3-7 July. For more information on the conference, click here.  

On May 25th, Clara Vlessing will be giving a guest lecture at the English Department of the University of Amsterdam. The lecture will be from 17.00-18.30 and will take place at P.C. Hoofthuis, room 1.04, Spuistraat 134. All are welcome to attend, but please register beforehand by contacting Dr. Marc Farrant (m.w.farrant@uva.nl). For more information…

On June 5th, Clara Vlessing will defend her PhD Thesis “Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst”. The defense will take place in the Senate Hall at Utrecht University. For more information, click here.  

Prof. Ann Rigney will moderate this year’s World Press Photo’s talks program entitled “The Stories that Matter”. For more information, see below or click herefor tickets. The World Press Photo Foundation and De Nieuwe Kerk present The Stories That Matter – a talks program reflecting on today’s pressing topics through the eyes of photojournalists and critical thinkers. This…

  Agenda What happens to social movements when their momentum ebbs away, the streets are emptied and campaigning ceases? They become memory. At the core of the Remembering Activism research project at Utrecht University is the claim that protests have afterlives in the stories that are later told about them with the help of texts,…

Protest Movement “Justice for David” in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Between Private Forensic Investigation, Public Mourning and Political Activism  The death of one student under unclear circumstances in the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka gained public resonance after the father of the deceased privately initiated a forensic investigation showing the lack of the rule of…

On January 26, 2023, the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies has announced that Duygu Erbil, a member of the ReAct project team, has won first prize for Best Reviewed Article with her article ‘The Making of a Young Martyr: Discursive Legacies of the Turkish “Youth Myth” in the Afterlife of Deniz Gezmiş’. In Youth…

In the context of the current war, commentators frequently point to the Kremlin’s ludicrous vilifications of Ukrainians, as brutal ‘fascists,’ rabid ‘nationalists,’ dangerous ‘Bandera-supports,’ or marionetted ‘instruments’ of the ‘Russophobic’ West. The conspiracism and anachronism of this rhetoric is widely acknowledged. Yet the mechanisms by which Putinist propaganda weaponizes ‘the past’ leave many questions open….

This event is organized by Daniele Salerno for his project MEMORIGHTS – Cultural Memory in LGBT Activism for Rights,which is affiliated with the ERC project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (PI Prof. Ann Rigney).  Contact: Dr. Daniele Salerno, d.salerno@uu.nl. Linguistic, economic and geographical barriers – among others – make the dialogue…

Duygu Erbil & Clara Vlessing This blog draws from a presentation we gave as part of ReAct’s recent conference on “Remembering Contentious Lives”. Speeches and speaking have long been essential to contentious politics. While oratory practices are shared across different repertoires of contention, the ideal of the freedom of speech has been an underlining principle…

The movement for reparations for transatlantic enslavement ties past, present, and future together in a call for recognition, reckoning, and reformation. Reparations detractors call for activists to ‘move on’ from the injustices of the past. Yet, the history, memory, and legacies of transatlantic enslavement remain live issues, increasingly at the centre of public debates. Although…

“Memory Politics in Legacy Media: The Case of ‘Activism’”

“Solidarity Across Time and Space: Structures of Feeling in the Press”

“After Abolition: Memories of Antislavery in European Women’s Rights Periodicals”

“Stories in the Wild: Collective Narratives and How They Are Remade”

Panel 1: Justice, Memory and Activism (10:00 – 12:00 CET) Looking at the relationship between memorialisation and contentious politics, this panel focuses on the discourses and practices of justice, and the challenges these face. Andrea Hepworth (Victoria University of Wellington) Duygu Erbil (Utrecht University) Eva Rüskamp (University of Freiburg) Moderator: Ann Rigney (Utrecht University) Panel 1: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YWEzYmM4NmEtYzZjZi00YzRiLWEyZmEtODYxZjkzNDc5OWJk%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22d72758a0-a446-4e0f-a0aa-4bf95a4a10e7%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22f129b22a-2e3f-4c41-ade0-1e364f03d64c%22%7d…

19 May 2022 OSL PhD day: Making Stories Work

“Shifting Solidarities in the Cultural Memory of Emma Goldman”

“Not Forgetting Deniz Gezmiş: Storied Life of a ‘Martyr’ and the Construction of the ’68 Generation in Turkey”

“Cultural Memory as Renewable Resource”

Duygu Erbil It was 6 May 2022 and, like hundreds of other people in Karşıyaka Cemetery, Ankara, I was visiting the tomb of the Marxist-Leninist martyr Deniz Gezmiş to observe the 50th anniversary of the execution of Gezmiş and his two other comrades. Most of those visiting the cemetery that day were leftist or centrist…

Daniele Salerno: In spring, thanks to wind and insects, pollen grains can be carried from one flower to another of a different variety. This is what botanists call cross-pollination, and it sustains natural diversity. As Lisa M. Corrigan argues in her work, cross-pollination also exists in culture: stories may travel over to other stories, moved…

    The experience and anticipation of environmental loss—whether of plant and animal species, ecosystems, landscapes, or an inhabitable planet—cause profound sorrow, which is being felt more and more acutely by a growing portion of the world’s population as we move ever deeper into the Anthropocene. However, as yet, we are somewhat at a loss…

Anna Stibbe: That Indonesia and the Netherlands share history is a well-known fact, but this history has been told in a completely different way on each side. The recent commotion around the term Bersiap – used only in the Netherlands to indicate the period of extreme violence in Indonesia in 1945-1946 – made this painfully…

Edited by Ann Rigney and Daniele Salerno Contemporary repertoires of protest have been adapting to digitally-oriented media environments (Tilly 2006; Hoskins 2017; Treré 2018; Merrill, Keightley, and Daphi 2020), begging the question how they will be archived for the future. Since the global wave of protests against the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the…

Ann Rigney: A former municipal swimming pool in the Belgian city of Liège is now home to a museum called the Cité Miroir, dedicated to “citizenship, memory, and intercultural dialogue”. On permanent display is an exhibition devoted to the memory of struggles for social justice and workers’ rights in this heavily industrialized province. The catalogue…

Organized as part of the ERC research project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (PI Prof. Ann Rigney) Contact: Dr. Sophie van den Elzen, react@uu.nl.   In 1903, British suffragettes adopted the motto “Deeds not words” to signal their tactical shift from peaceful protest to a more direct and violent repertoire of…

Keynotes: Margaretta Jolly (University of Sussex) and Anna Poletti (Utrecht University). Contact: Ann Rigney, Clara Vlessing, Duygu Erbil, react@uu.nl What can studying life stories tell us about the relationship between memory and activism? Auto/biography studies has long been interested in the ways in which written lives construct subjectivities. Life writing itself has under certain conditions been theorised as a…

Michelle Caswell (UCLA) The talk will draw from Caswell’s new book, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, May 2021), to argue that archivists can and should do more to disrupt white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy beyond the standard liberal archival solutions of diverse collecting and more inclusive description. Grounded in the emerging field of critical…

Title: “Intersectionality in the Cultural Memory of Sylvia Pankhurst”

Title: “Context upheld: the digital and local premeditations of a Sylvia Pankhurst Mural”

”Using Computer Vision to Explore Historical Newspaper Collections”

Sophie van den Elzen: We will be missing open-air celebrations of May Day this year. There will be few Russians on the Red Square for the variety of causes which May 1st has come to mark since the collapse of the Soviet regime. The tradition of having mass anti-austerity, anti-capitalist, anti-government, and decolonial protests on…

Stories in the Wild: How Public Life is Shaped by Narrative online Inaugural lecture and seminar series by Professor Ann Rigney, laureate of the Belgian Francqui Chair 2020-2021 at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Antwerp. “And together, we shall write an American story of hope, not fear.” As the closing words of…

Join  Thursday May 6th, 3 – 4:30pm (EST/Zoom link here) for a talk and discussion “Revolutionary Affects and the Archive of Memory” with Professor Manijeh Moradian (Barnard College) and respondents Persis Karim (SFSU) and Ann Rigney (Utrecht). The talk will focus on the first chapter of Manijeh Moradian’s upcoming book This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United…

Daniele Salerno: The Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina represents a group of trans activists who collect, organize, and circulate photographs and written materials (diaries, letters, postcards) about trans people in Argentina, with a focus on visual archiving. In 2020, in collaboration with Editorial Chaco, this group published an eponymous selection of photos and archival…

Marit van de Warenburg: The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that shook up both sides of the Atlantic last summer, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, were infused by music. In the United States, songs such as Anderson.Paak’s “Lockdown” and H.E.R.’s “I Can’t Breathe” sought to capture the…

David Beorlegui Zarranz: On 15 September 2020, the Spanish Council of Ministers approved a draft bill on the Law of Democratic Memory which acknowledged the crimes committed during the Civil War (1936-1939) and the Francoist military dictatorship (1939-1978). Despite the magnitude of the Franco regime’s violence and the deep scars it left on the social…

Christel N. Temple is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her latest book, Black Cultural Mythology (SUNY, 2020), provides a highly innovative conceptual framework for exploring the complex relations between cultural memory, heroic narratives, activism and creative production within and beyond the African diaspora. The event will start with a lecture by Dr. Temple, followed…

Duygu Erbil: The widespread availability of smartphones has provided activists with new tools to document protest and ensure that its memory is preserved. The Internet is full of advice on how to keep electronic devices safe during demonstrations so as to minimize the risk of evidence – of numbers, of peacefulness, of police brutality –…

As illness and deaths mount and COVID-19 continues to exact its toll, there is no question that we are experiencing a cultural trauma of enormous magnitude and globality.  The time is right for asking: What does it mean for a community as a whole to experience trauma? How does the community represent the trauma, both…

How can we respond to the pervasive sense of disappointment and left melancholia lingering in the wake of the failed projects of revolutionary societal transformation? Among theorists and activists alike, twentieth-century narratives of inevitable progress and universal human emancipation have been replaced by a sober reckoning with past disappointments, failures and defeats. At the same time,…

Emilia Salvanou: On Wednesday 7 October, the Supreme Court of Greece passed its long-awaited verdict on the Golden Dawn party, declaring it to be a criminal organization. It was also held responsible for a series of violent attacks on immigrants and on its political opponents. This judicial milestone was in marked contrast to the relative…

Title: The Making of a Young Martyr: Discursive Legacies of the Turkish “Youth Myth” in the Afterlife of Deniz Gezmiş

www.icomos.nl/agenda/second-online-lecture-public-monuments-memory-identity-discussion-across-borders

David Beorlegui, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), will be joining the ReAct team as a visiting researcher in the period September-November 2020. David’s research deals with the analysis of the radical movements, subjectivities, and temporalities that emerged in Spain and Western Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Theoretically, his…

  Argentina Human Rights Emblem Seeks Entry to UNESCO World Heritage List

Ann Rigney: In the centre of Paris on the afternoon of 16 May 1871 a huge crowd was waiting to the sound of the Marseillaise. Around a quarter past five, an expectant silence fell on the company as, after hours of preparation, the sign was given for the cables to be pulled. All eyes were…

Her talk is entitled ‘The Afterlife of Hope: how the killing of demonstrators is remembered.’ In her presentation and in the discussion that follows, Ann Rigney talks about cultural memory in connection with activism and social movements as well as ways of moving away from thinking about the past primarily in terms of trauma. As the podcast…

Tashina Blom: While Trump is egging them on and Bolsonaro has even joined them and called them “patriots”, the protesters taking to the streets against the coronavirus lockdown are mobilizing more than just nationalist rhetoric. They are weaponising feminist slogans from the abortion rights movement. The question is: why? Why would anti-lockdown protests become a…

Thomas Smits: Yesterday evening World Press photo announced the winners of its 2020 contest. Nicolas Asfouri won the first prize in the General News category for his series ‘Hong Kong Unrest,’ which documents the vehement, unprecedentedly-large and long-lasting, anti-government protests in the city. Describing the first picture in the series, the World Press website notes:…

Clara Vlessing: On 8 March, International Women’s Day (IWD), last year I marched through the streets of Amsterdam in a tide of shouting placard-wielding protestors. By planning the protest on this day, its organisers imbued it with a sense of historicity, aiming to emphasise the changes and continuities in a long-running progression of women’s marches…

In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to preserve and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people’s cultural memory and historic lived environment, rather than ancient history…

Daniele Salerno: Her name was Alicia Raquel Delaporte but everybody called her “la gorda Silvia”. For the 21-year-old artist Ezequiel Yrurtia la gorda Silvia was “mi abuela”: his grandmother. Yet, Yrurtia never met his grandmother. Instead he decided to reconstruct her story by gathering pictures, oral testimonies and traces of her life. The result is…

DUE TO THE DEVELOPMENTS WITH THE CORONAVIRUS THIS LECTURE IS CANCELLED!   Metapictures: For an Atlas of Visual Culture(See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Metapictures,” in Picture Theory (Chicago 1994).) 1. The Concept of the Meta- applies to all forms of secondariness, reflection, self-reference. Metalanguage, metatheater, metapsychology. Philosophy itself is constituted by the move to meta-:…

During this evening, we will explore how media constructs through photographic images the representation of protest. Guests are artist Florian Göttke and researcher Ann Rigney. Taferelen arose from the desire to create a ‘cross-fertilisation’ between the work of image makers and other research areas. People across different disciplines often share research interests and thus could…

Sophie van den Elzen: What does the good fight smell like? For the 2019 holiday season, well-known cosmetics franchise The Body Shop has laid claim to the answer and has bottled a “lasting warm and spicy scent” under the name ActivistTM. I recently came across this product during my Christmas shopping and had difficulty picturing…

Ann Rigney: In the last weeks the headlines have been full of protesters. Each day seems to introduce a new flashpoint. Thousands of Dutch farmers on tractors resisting government measures to reduce nitrogen emissions while thousands of their fellow citizens perform lie-ins in the name of Extinction Rebellion. A massive crowd marching on Westminster waving…

Ann Rigney will be giving a lecture at the University of St. Andrews on 31 October 2019. More information: events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/contentious-commemoration-between-memory-and-activism-a-cisi-cims-public-lecture-by-professor-ann-rigney-university-of-utrecht/

Tashina Blom presented her initial findings with a presentation entitled “Archiving Anger: The Affective Afterlife of Protest” at the conference Archiving Protest, held at Warwick University on 13 May 2019. The conference was organized by the Warwick Centre for Critical Legal Studies.

Ann Rigney and Clara Vlessing presented their ReAct research at the two-day conference on the Afterlives of Protest, held at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. The conference was convened by the AHRC-funded network The Afterlives of Protest; more information at protestmemory.wordpress.com.

Tashina Blom and Clara Vlessing presented their projects at the 2019 Mnemonics summer school, held in Utrecht 18-20 September, and devoted to the topic of Memory and Activism. For the full programme see mnemonics.ugent.be.

Ann Rigney participated in a Special Session on Memory Activism in Comparative Perspective, organized during the 3rd annual Memory Studies Association conference, which took place in Madrid on 27 June 2019. The session was convened by Yifat Gutman (Ben Gurion University, Israel) and Jessy Wüstenberg (York University, Canada).

This lecture will focus on the agents/activists who have been promoting the memory of the industrial past, asking what is at stake in their efforts. Starting from what arguably is the world capital of industrial heritage, the Ruhr region of Germany, it will move out to take to account of industrial heritage activism in other…

This lecture addresses the practice of literary memory activism, using the Refugee Tales (www.refugeetales.org) as an example. Refugee Tales is an outreach project of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group. Its aim is to put an end to indefinite detention of immigrants in prison-like Removal Centres. As a form of literary memory activism, Refugee Tales works…

This paper examines the manner in which the term ‘the disappeared’ now circulates globally, by setting the context of its emergence in Argentina and discussing the ‘artivism’ of the silhouette campaign. It then looks more closely at one instance in which the contours of the paradigm are rather different: the disappeared of the Northern Irish conflict….

How do masses of protesters form, appear, assume a political identity, dissolve and return? The presentation will deal with this question by focusing on the narrative and semiotic status of ‘the mass.’ Masses involved in protest represent a particular narrative and morphological configuration, the result of transformative processes that allow them to appear, acquire significance,…

The eighth Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies summer school will be hosted by the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, Wednesday 18-Friday 20 September, at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. The annual Mnemonics Summer School serves as an interactive forum in which junior and senior memory scholars meet in an informal and convivial setting to discuss each other’s…

Article on our project in El Pais. https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/06/23/actualidad/1561300389_026914.html?rel=mas