Call for Papers: Special Issue of Memory Studies edited by MSA

This call invites the submission of abstracts related to the overarching theme of the 2024 Memory Studies Association annual conference: Memories in Transit which took place in Lima, Peru. It was a great opportunity to share the vast production of memory studies in Latin America with a growing community of scholars in memory studies around the world.

People build memories that transition between places, spaces, groups, generations, and temporalities; between social struggles, political processes, and identities; via various repertoires and in different media formats. Memories in Transit is an invitation to reflect on the itineraries of these memories, their heterogeneity, and permanent transformations. As memories circulate between people and places, they are implicated in many social phenomena including processes of inequality, racism, exclusion, and migration. On the one hand, memories help sustain various forms of violence and authoritarianism. On the other hand, memories represent an important resource in the fight against injustices. We live in times of intense mobility caused by natural disasters, globalization, forced displacements, dispossession of territories, violence, and climate change. Mobility shapes contemporary societies, setting in motion memories that travel in oral, gestural, sonic, sensory, textual, or digital formats. Mobility produces new repertoires of meaning including forgetfulness, denial, and oblivion. How much of the past is reflected in new transmedia spaces? How do past events take shape in the present? How much does it change?  How do we talk about truth in an era of fake news? Memories in Transit is also an invitation to think about the return of phenomena we believed to have overcome (think about “Nunca Más” in the Southern Cone), such as populism, authoritarianism, and systematic violations of human rights that haunt societies, erode democracies and which are now prevalent in our countries.

We invite submissions connected to the following streams:

●       Mobility, migration, and refugees

●       Memory, activism, and social justice

●       Transitional Justice and public policies of memory

●       Conflict, violence, and memory

●       Populism, neopopulism, neoconservatism, and negationism

●       Indigenous and afro-descendant peoples and their memories

●       Memories of feminisms and sexual dissidences

●       Memory and the environment

●       Memoryscapes (digital, places, imagined)

●       Creative approaches to memory and embodiment

●       The coloniality and decolonising of memory

• Theoretical and Methodological approaches to memory studies

Timeline and Procedure:

The timeline for this special issue is very tight, so please only send a proposal if you are able to meet the below deadlines.

• Please send for consideration your abstract (500 words max) and a short biography (100 words max) in a single Word document to memoriesintransitmsa@gmail.com by Monday 16 December 2024.
• All abstracts will be reviewed by the editors and all applicants will be notified of the outcome of the review process by Thursday 16 January 2025.
• Final submission of the completed articles will be Thursday 16 April 2025.This will be followed by double blind peer review and corrections.

Articles should be between 6000 and 8000 words including notes and references and must be accompanied with a 150 word abstract and up to six key words.

Book reviews should be between 800 and 1500 words.

Please remember that authors will have to individually submit their articles using the ScholarOne platform.

• The special issue is scheduled to be published in February 2026, issue 19.1.

For more information on the Memory Studies journal’s publishing policy and advice for authors, please consult the journal’s website: https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/MSS

** Given the tight schedule for publication, we ask that you only submit an abstract if you are confident that you would be able to make the final submission date of Thursday 16 April 2025.**

*** You don’t need to have participated at the MSA2024 Conference in Lima to send your proposal for publication.***