The Slow Memory Podcast

In this episode, Members of Working Group 3 on the Transformation of Politics explore the history of International Women’s Day and how this date can be understood as a “slow commemoration”. Slow commemoration refers to dates in our calendar that appear to commemorate or celebrate something specific yet whose meaning is slippery. Slow commemorations attach themselves to multiple histories and multiple meanings: they can be filled with content to persuade you to fight for something, vote for something, or simply buy something. The 8 March is marked in many places in the world, but the meanings attached to it shift and slip according to time and location. Sometimes it is a day to celebrate women in traditional ways with gift-giving and flowers, sometimes it is a day to protest continued inequality, in some places it is viewed as nothing more than a Soviet hangover, and in others, it is a marketing opportunity.Narrated by Sara Jones and Maija SpurinaMusic by Rasec Música Sin Copyrigth from Pixabay

Susana Gomes da Silva, coordinator of Education at the Modern Art Museum, from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal; Blerta Hoçia, a curator from the Humanitarian Law Center, based in Kosovo; and Professor Vicky Karaiskou, from the Open University of Cyprus, delve into the meanings of slow curating and what slow curating has entailed in their curatorial work. Against the backdrop of the times of acceleration, they discuss slow curating – as an approach and a method – to critically explore the entanglements of material, affective, and nonhuman worlds. Inquiring into the curatorial domain through the slow memory lens, they pursue an ethical framework challenging representations of the fast-paced and anthropocentric agency.Read by: Vjollca KrasniqiIsabel Machado Alexandre Alice SemedoMusic by Maksym Dudchyk and UNIVERSFIELD from Pixabay

Memory Studies has been very much shaped by how societies remember extreme violence and sudden conflicts. However, Slow Memory researchers believe that the key social challenges of today – climate change, disinformation, accelerated technological advancements, economic inequalities, and conflicts over values – require not only a rethinking of the conceptual tools but also changes in the methods of conducting research on social remembrance. Why and how should we slow down in the field of Memory Studies? Will this also affect the ways we collaborate with each other? In this podcast, Jenny Wüstenberg (Professor of History and Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University and Chair of Slow Memory COST Action) and Joanna Wawrzyniak (Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory at the University of Warsaw and Action Vice-Chair) explain what the Slow Memory Action is about in a conversation with Sara Dybris McQuaid (Associate Professor of British and Irish Society and Culture and a member of the Action Core Group).

In this era of rapid acceleration, scholars are subjected to unprecedented pressures to deliver at a pace that is unsustainable. The “boom” in memory studies and memory practice since the 1980s is one expression of this sped-up environment. We operate in systems that require the fulfillment of simultaneous roles of teacher, researcher, administrator, manager, counselor, networker and more. All of these roles are shaped by embeddedness in the regime of neoliberalism in the Anthropocene. Imperatives and deadlines of scholarship are determined by funders, institutional concerns, and administrative checklists, rather than the needs of high-quality, rigorous and engaged research. This is not only detrimental to our health and wellbeing but leads to mediocre research at best and to missing key insights about (slow) memory at worst.Slow memory conceptualizes practices of remembrance that are ‘multi-sited’, ‘eventless’ and refer to slow-moving phenomena. But we are hampered in our ability to study these processes by a 24-hour news cycle coupled to a 24-hour academic assembly line. To succeed in this system we are expected to work at such a breakneck speed that it seems the only options are to keep the pace at an unsustainable rate or drop out. We believe there is another way that involves slowing down our research methods, processes and thinking. To this end, we propose the Cres Manifesto.