Call for Papers

Final Update: In lieu of the Sixth Annual Conference, the MSA will host a Week of Virtual Events from July 4 to July 8, 2022, organised in collaboration with the Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University (supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea). These events will be followed by a series of online panels organised by some of the MSA working groups on July 11 and 12. The Week will include a series of panels featuring different professionals from various fields. Attendance and registration is free also for non-members, although an MSA membership brings additional perks like access to the journal Memory Studies or to the content of the new working and regional groups’ pages.

Update January 2022: Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 outlook and restrictions in Korea, the MSA Sixth Annual Meeting in Seoul must be cancelled. Read the full notice here.

The Memory Studies Association (MSA) invites proposals for its sixth annual conference, July 3-7, 2022. The conference will be hosted by the Critical Global Studies Institute, Sogang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

The MSA is very enthusiastic to host its next annual meeting in Seoul, as the first one to take place outside of Europe. In the hope that the COVID-19 situation will improve, the MSA 2022 Program Committee has decided that the conference will be organised as an in-person event. We will closely monitor the status of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Korean government’s policy to ensure the health and safety of all participants. While the main events will be live-streamed, due to technical and financial limitations a fully hybrid event will not be possible. In order to accommodate more participants, however, Working and Regional Groups are also invited to organise a limited number of fully on-line events to take place in addition to the main conference program immediately before and after the in-person meeting. The MSA Forward and Methodological workshop will also take place on-line.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Solidarity.” The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic—amid rising inequality and the climate crisis—have forcefully demonstrated the necessity and precarity of solidarity, as well as its contested nature. This has, in turn, brought to light the need to reflect upon the pivotal role of collective memory in constructing, reinforcing, or interrogating various forms of solidarity. We hope that the conference will provide an opportunity to bring together a range of different approaches and analyses for illuminating the multi-faceted and multi-layered dimensions of mnemonic solidarity. We particularly encourage proposals that critically examine the limitations of the prevailing epistemologies of antagonistic and/or cosmopolitan memory, de-centre global North perspectives, and explore new ways of imagining transnational mnemonic solidarity based on justice, mutual understanding, and recognition of differences. Of course, we also very much welcome proposals on all other areas of memory studies—especially those areas that have been relatively under-explored.

Proposals are invited for panels, roundtables, and individual papers from members who are committed to traveling to Seoul for the in-person meeting. The MSA especially encourages panel proposals. The panel should, in principle, consist of 4 presenters, a chair, and optionally a discussant. The participant may appear as a presenter only once but can act as chair or discussant in more than one panel. The roundtable should consist of around 4-5 participants with shorter statements and discussions. More detailed information—including submission rules and guidelines—will be posted in due course on the MSA website, so please check back regularly for updates.