Election of Ethics & Finance Committes 2021

Nomination Statement:

I would like to serve on the Finance Committee because I am eager to become more involved with the Memory Studies Association and because I believe financial transparency is essential to its continued growth. Like good health, good book-keeping is unappreciated until it is missing. My goal is to be unappreciated. I will accomplish this through complete financial transparency, accurate book-keeping, and reliably boring reports. Prior to becoming an academic, I worked for a decade managing study abroad programs. In this role, I collected all receipts, monitored all bank statements, and audited all balance sheets for over 30 study abroad programs with a total budget exceeding $1,000,000.

Biography:

Dr. Ela Rossmiller is an Assistant Professor of Global Studies at Wilson College, where she teaches comparative politics and international relations. Her research concerns Polish memory politics after 1989.

Nomination Statement:

Power and power differentials are at the core of the concerns highlighted in the MSA Code of Conduct. Whether it is inter-personal relationships, inter-group relationships, or state-citizen relationships, it is important to uphold professional ethics standards in the memory studies community and to be a source of support for members, including having a grievance process to address concerns or problems raised. Over the past few years, as a Board member and now chair of my university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), I have become increasingly involved in ethics considerations regarding research being conducted under the auspices of the university.

The historic misuse of power in medical studies led to the creation of IRBs in the US and, as memory scholars, we are all aware of how the repercussions of such abuses are continuing to this day. The IRB reviews all academic research that involves human participants. It is designed to protect human subjects, particularly those from vulnerable populations, and is involved with the ethics of research and researcher behavior. As IRB Board members we undertake continuous training to understand best practices across fields, changes in US federal guidelines, and foreign or international ethics requirements. In addition, through my institutional roles, research, and interests, I have become involved in how professional ethics interacts with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues. Although there are universal ethics standards, there are also DEI considerations that have to be taken into account when addressing specific situations. This is of particular note for an international organization with members from across the world, in order to ensure equitable ethical considerations but also to enhance conflict resolution where tensions arise from or are exacerbated by a lack of common assumptions. Finally, my research has brought me first-hand experience of the role of the state and corporations in academic freedom issues. In the past, the dissemination of my research has been curtailed by organizations that are dependent on foreign government funding. Such concerns have been amplified by our move to online platforms for dissemination, including webinars. Since the onset of the pandemic, we have become reliant on private companies to disseminate our research and conduct our classes, and those companies, sometimes through government pressure, have taken an active role in determining what can or cannot be shown on their platforms. This impacts our academic freedom. For all these reasons, I am quite interested in serving on the MSA Ethics Committee and believe I have something to contribute as we navigate new issues and old issues through new tools.

Biography:

Mary M. McCarthy is a professor of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of memory studies, diaspora studies, feminist studies, and international relations, with a regional focus on Asia and the Asia Pacific. Her most recent publications include “The Creation and Utilization of Opportunity Structures for Transnational Activism on WWII Sexual Slavery in Asia” in Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline Sierp, ed. Agency in Transnational Memory Politics (Berghahn Books, 2020), “Political and Social Contestation in the Memorialization of Comfort Women in the United States” in Sabine Marschall, ed. Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement: Migrants and Monuments (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), and “The Enduring Challenges of History Issues” in Takeo Hoshi and Phillip Lipscy, eds. The Political Economy of the Abe Government and Abenomics Reforms (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She has been an active member of the Memory Studies Association since 2017.

Nomination Statement:

With my academic background in conflict theory and practical training in facilitation and mediation, I believe that I will be an asset to the Ethics Committee. I can assist in both interpersonal and intergroup conflicts should they arise. I have experience developing ground rules with groups or codes of conduct to create the conditions for respectful engagement. Finally, as my research is on conflicted histories, I bring experience in addressing memory and conflict which could be useful across the organization. I also have a background in ethics in field research with participants and developing protocols for international review boards. I have done research projects with participants on memory themes most recently. The Ethics Committee can draw on the collective experience of MSA members to develop the standards.

As the memory studies field grows, there will be more of this kind of memory in the present research and the ethics of working with (often traumatized) people are important to highlight. Furthermore, reflexive issues around the experience of the researcher is important and self-care could be an aspect of the standards. Developing ethical standards for the Memory Studies Association is yet another important step in professionalization by creating standardized practices for this interdisciplinary international field of study. I hope to be part of the MSA’s continued growth and development.

Biography:

Jill Strauss, PhD, teaches Conflict Resolution and Communications at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). Her research involves Restorative Practices and the visual interpretation of contested histories. She incorporates virtual reality technology in her curriculum so that students can make hidden histories visible by creating monuments in augmented reality. This project has grown into a collaboration with Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. Jill is a member of the MSA Museums and Memory Working Group and is co-editing a special issue journal with the MSA Witnessing Working Group. Jill completed her PhD at Ulster University in Northern Ireland in 2010, where she designed an innovative fieldwork project integrating storytelling and visual art for empathy and validation as one way to address a history of mutual humiliation and historical conflict. Jill is co-editor of Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press 2019) along with other articles and book chapters.

Nomination Statement:

I am hereby expressing interest in joining the Ethics committee of the Memory Studies Association. I am an Associate Professor for Sociology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and am deeply committed to ethics in both the research process and in professional conduct. I work on issues of nationalism, identity, and memory in the region of the Western Balkans, and have followed the work of MSA over many years.

Where ethics are concerned, I am a member of my school’s ethics in research committee, as well as the university-wide committee on ethics issues, which deals with matters across the social and natural sciences and humanities, and I also teach ethics issues extensively in my research methods and PhD courses. In terms of professional engagement, I sit on committees of the International Mixed Methods Association, on the organizing committee of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) annual convention, and serve as associate editor at the journals Communist and Post-Communist Studies and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. In addition, I have had a chance to work in departments across Europe (Austria, Slovenia, Serbia) and the US (from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities like Princeton and Harvard), as well as a range of department perspectives – including my native sociology as well as in the business school where I am currently employed.

Throughout my previous experience in these very different associations, journals, and professional settings across different international and field contexts, I have participated in a range of discussions on ethical issues, beginning with those in research (e.g. ethics in work with human subjects), to those in the professional community (e.g. bullying), to issues in the publication process (e.g. those as “little” as the question of permissible self-citation standards, to larger issues like publishing work by scholars convicted of sexual harassment). I believe all of these issues warrant our attention, and am deeply pleased to see that many professional associations, including APSA and MSA, are starting to take them more seriously. Statements and recommendations by bodies such as the MSA can serve to help scholars across the professional community across the globe in setting standards of conduct, civility, and respect. While I certainly think many of these issues are global and universal to all disciplines, I nonetheless recognize the specificity of each field of research, and find it extremely important to discuss how these issues apply to our specific work in memory studies. It would be a pleasure to have a chance to participate in these discussions at MSA and help MSA contribute to making the professional field to which we have devoted our careers a more civil, fair, and accountable place.

Biography:

Tamara Pavasović Trošt is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (2012). Her research interests include nationalism and ethnicity, memory politics, and youth values. Previously, she was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, and spent the 2015-16 year as a Fung Fellow at Princeton University. Her most recent publications include Europeanization and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (co-editor, 2021), and various articles on history education and nationalism in Memory Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and War & Society.