Deadline: August 15, 2024
Södertörns Högskola, Stockholm, 12-13 September, 2024
Storytelling takes place everywhere: in books, films, songs, magazines, and everyday conversations, as well as in school textbooks, in museums, and in academic research. But some stories are difficult and nearly always incomplete: stories about the past, and especially, about atrocities in the past. This is particularly noticeable in Eastern Europe, where constructions or reconstructions of national historical memory remain controversial, sensitive, and contested. Memories of past events tend to be fundamentally political. Governments establish or close museums of national trauma, promote some interpretations of historical events while rejecting or even legislating against others, erect or dismantle statues of national heroes, and institute new days of national commemoration. This conference will explore different uses of stories of the past, in a number of different contexts (in media productions, educational settings, academia and politics). This two-day conference at Södertörns Högskola in Stockholm seeks to attract established scholars, early career researchers, and PhD students conducting research on the Baltic countries or Central and Eastern Europe (including the Balkans).
Papers might include topics such as
-history as told in public spaces
-history as reflected in art
-stories conveyed in educational settings
-controlling public historical consciousness
-legal intervention into memory
-popular culture and historical narratives -control over museums and cultural institutions
-public resistance to conventional storytelling
Please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words to anna.krakus@hum.ku.dk by August 15, 2024. Travel might be covered for some attendants, please identify need with your abstract.