Call for Abstracts

Expert Meeting on
“Words, Contention, Memory”

Deadline: March 1st, 2022

Organized as part of the ERC research project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (PI Prof. Ann Rigney), this expert meeting seeks to gather scholars across disciplines to investigate a key aspect of the power of words which is frequently overlooked or left implicit: the way in which words mediate actors’ relationship to the past, and to canonical events in the transnational history of political activism. In doing so, it looks to make a significant contribution to the study of the “memory-activism nexus” (Rigney, 2018), and to respond to the contemporary sense of urgency around the politics of language (see, for instance, Modest and Lelijveld 2018).

The gathering is organized around the hypothesis that keywords, slogans, and historical shorthands play a key role in structuring traditions of political activism. Slogans like ¡No Pasarán! (“they shall not pass”) travel across time and place to mobilise crowds. Shorthands like the soixante-huitards or Forty-Eighters function as proud monikers to cement generational unity and import particular narrative frames into debates. Retrospective realignment, or “rhetorical redescription” of canonical events in modern vocabulary (Skinner 1999, 67), such as the recent relabeling of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the Library of Congress (OU, 2021), creates new narrative continuities.

Studying activist language use through the lens of cultural memory, this event seeks to advance recent work in social movement studies, memory studies, conceptual history, and discourse analysis. The meeting will eventually result in a special issue or edited volume of contributions which aims to:

  • identify key aspects of what, paraphrasing Sidney Tarrow (2014, 21) and Carol Gluck (2009, 3), could be called the ‘word work’ of social movements. This includes the deliberate creation of historical continuity, and the promotion of particular historical and/or master narratives.
  • historicize key words, phrases and slogans of modern activism, and their trajectories across space and time
  • foster critical conversation about the importance of words and concepts in (the study of) social movements

Contributions may address cases or questions of methodology, including:

  • words travelling across movements, linguistic contexts, and media; words as travelling metonyms of shared narratives; cases of ‘word workers’ and linguistic intervention; ‘stickiness’ of particular words and slogans; tactical language use; discursive power vs. grass-roots discursive repertoires; struggles over the meaning of historical events
  • words as carriers of memory; studying the ‘discursive repertoire’; longue durée perspectives; the advantages of traditional approaches vs. the promise of digital humanities.

If you are interested in participating, please send a 350-word abstract and short bio to react@uu.nl before March 1st, 2022. We are pleased to announce that Prof. Tamar Katriel (Haifa University) and Prof. Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill (St. Mary’s, Texas) are confirmed keynotes for the event. The meeting will take place onOctober 19-21, 2022, at Utrecht University.

You can read more about the meeting (and the aforementioned references) here.