Details

At: 29/01/2021 6:00pm, in cooperation with: Las Políticas de la Memoria and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) as part of dMSA, the Memory Studies Association’s online event series.

Speakers:

Jocelyn Martin, Ateneo de Manila University

Francisco Ferrándiz, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

Alexei Yurchak, University of California at Berkeley

Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Utrecht University (Discussant)

Roundtable Marcos, Franco, Lenin: Necropolitical Dissonances, hosted by: Francisco Ferrándiz

Working at the intersection of political science, ethnographic sociology, and contemporary historiography, Dr Sarah Gensburger specializes in the social dynamic of memory. Since 2015, she has been working on memorialization in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris, as well as on the social appropriations of the past by visitors at memorials and commemorative sites and exhibitions. In this conversation, facilitated by Prof. Stef Craps and Dr Catherine Gilbert, Dr Gensburger will discuss her 2019 French Voices Award-winning book Memory on my Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood (Paris 2015-2016), which traces the evolving memorialization processes following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and their impact on the local landscape. She will also discuss her new project Vitrines en confinement – Vetrine in quarentena (Windows in Lockdown), which documents public responses to the current coronavirus pandemic from different sites across Europe through the creation of a photographic archive of public space. The conversation will highlight issues around the immediacy of contemporary memorialization practices, the ways in which people engage with their local space during times of crisis, and how we are all actively involved in preserving memory for the future.

Jocelyn Martin is Assistant Professor in the English Department of the Ateneo de Manila University, where she specialises in Memory and Trauma Studies, She is also Managing Editor of Thomson-Reuter and Scopus-indexed journal, Kritika Kultura. Trained in European universities, she finished an AB in “langues et linguistiques” (ULB; University of Westminster); an MA in European Journalism (Ircom) and a PhD in “langues et littératures” (Université Libre de Bruxelles). Aside from serving in the Advisory Board of the Memory Studies Association, she is also Founding Member of a research network within the Council for European Studies (Columbia University) and of the Perpetrator Studies Network (Utrecht University). Early 2020, she was invited as Zumkehr Lecturer sponsored by the University of Ohio and since October 2020, she is part of the Editorial Board of “Mobilizing Memories” book series at Brill. Her current projects include publications for Bloomsbury, Berghahn, Routledge, and Brill. Raised in the Philippines and Europe, with an experience in financial PR in Merrill Lynch France, she publishes in English and French; speaks Filipino and Italian; reads Spanish; and posseses some German and Chinese.
Francisco Ferrándiz is a Tenured Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain. He has a Ph.D. in social and cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley (1996). His research focuses on the anthropology of the body, violence and social memory. Since 2002, he has conducted research on the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, analyzing the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War (1936‒1939). He is presently Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project The Politics of Memory Exhumations in Contemporary Spain, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science. His main books on this topic are “El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil” (Anthropos 2014), and, as edited volumes, “Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights” (University of Pennsylvania Press 2015, with Antonius C.G.M Robben) and “Memory Worlds: Reframing Time and the Past” (special issue Memory Studies, 2020, with M Hristova and J Vollmeyer). He is currently a member of MSA’s Executive Committee.
Alexei Yurchak received his Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology from Duke University in 1997 (after having received a graduate degree in physics from Russia). His interests and areas of expertise include Soviet history and the processes of post-socialist transformation in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; political institutions and ideologies in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; political philosophy and language philosophy; the interface between language/discourse and power; comparative studies of communism and capitalism anthropology of media; visual anthropology; experimental artistic scenes (especially, Russia and US); urban geography and anthropology of space. He is both an Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology as well as a Core Faculty member in the graduate program at the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.
Antonius C. G. M. Robben is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University. He was appointed as full professor in 1993 and retired in 2020. He was a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1986-1989), past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology (1994-1999), and a research fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University (2004). He has also been the director of the Iraq Research Project (2006-2010). A recipient of several National Science Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research grants, he has conducted years of fieldwork in northeast Brazil on pluriform fishing economies and in Argentina on political violence and sociocultural trauma. At present, he is conducting research on the wartime destruction and postwar reconstruction of the port city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.