Difficult heritage and conflicting memories: Perspectives on troubled pasts

This seminar is in English.

How do we deal with memories of conflict and struggle, with ‘difficult heritage’, and with conflicting versions of the past? Together with Anna Cento Bull, Hans Lauge Hansen (2016) has developed the concept ‘agonistic memory’, drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s critique of ‘cosmopolitan memory’. This talk sets out to revisit this concept to explore how it can be mobilized for current museum and archive practice and for policy making within the heritage sector.

This conversation is part of the research project “The Lost Heritage: Improving Collaborations between Digital Film Archives” (Swedish Research Council 2021-2024)

Arranged by Linnaeus University, Sweden, Higher seminar series at the dept for Film and Literature (IFL), in collaboration with Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), IMSMemory at LNU, the Centre for Applied Heritage at LNU, MSA Nordic within the Memory Studies Association and the workgroup Media and Cultural Memory at NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies. 2 (2)

Bios:

Hans Lauge Hansen is Professor with special responsibilities at the School of Communication and Culture, Department of Spanish, Aarhus University. He is specialized on the topics of contemporary Spanish & Latin American narrative, and cultural memory studies. He was PI in the research project La memoria novelada on the cultural memory of the Spanish civil war financed by the Danish Research Council 2011-14), and vice PI in the Horizon 2020 project, Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST, 2016-19). Selected publications: “A Case for Agonistic Peacebuilding in Colombia”, Third World Quarterly, Forthcoming 2022 (together with Diana González Martin and Agustín Parra Grondona), “To understand doesn’t mean that you will approve: transnational audience research on a theatre representation of evil”, in Agonistic Memory and Representations of War in Twentieth-Century Europe, Kansteiner & Berger (eds), Palgrave, Forthcoming 2022 (Together with Diana González Martin), “Spanish and Latin American Memory Novels”. In: Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism(s) in Global Comparative Perspective, Larsen and Lombardo (Eds.), John Benjamins, Forthcoming 2021; “On Agonistic Narratives of Migration”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 23:4, 2020, “War Museums as Agonistic Spaces: Possibilities, Opportunities and Constraints” in International Journal of Heritage Studies 25:6, 2019 (together with Anna Cento Bull, Wulf Kansteiner and Nina Parish), and “On Agonistic Memory”, Memory Studies, 9:4, 2016 (together with Anna Cento Bull).

Dagmar Brunow is associate professor of film studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her research centres on archives and audiovisual heritage, cultural memory, documentary filmmaking as well as feminist and queer experimental filmmaking and video practice. Her research projects “The Lost Heritage: Improving Collaborations between Digital Film Archives" (2021-2024) and “The Cultural Heritage of Moving Images” (2016-2018) have been financed by the Swedish Research Council. Selected publications: Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Filmmaking as Archival Intervention (de Gruyter, 2015, paperback 2021); “Queering the archive: amateur films and LGBT-memory.” In: Making the Invisible Visible. Reclaiming Women’s Agency in Swedish Film History and Beyond, red. Ingrid Stigsdotter. Lund: Nordic Academic Press 2019, s. 97-117; “Manchester’s post-punk heritage: mobilizing and contesting transcultural memory in the context of urban regeneration.” Culture Unbound, special issue "Narrating the City: Contesting Trajectories of Memories and Futures in Urban Space" 4/2018, s. 9-29; “Naming, shaming, framing? Ambivalence of queer visibility in audiovisual archives.” In: The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilizing Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures. red. Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä & Ingrid Ryberg. Manchester University Press 2018, s. 174-195.

Organized by Dagmar Brunow and Nafiseh Mousavi, LNU