Lecture ‘What do we mean by Slow Memory?’ as part of the Online Course ‘The Twentieth Century in European Memory’

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March 13, 2024
9.30-10.30 am CET
Online via Microsoft Teams
Speakers: Joanna Wawrzyniak (Warsaw) and Tea Sindbaek Andersen (Copenhagen)
Moderated by Kateřina Králová (Charles University)
This online course is organized by Working Group 2 ‘Transformation of Welfare’.

Contested memories and painful pasts regularly re-appear in the Europan public sphere on transnational, national, and regional levels. The war in Ukraine as well as the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel and Israel fighting back, but also the recent experience with global pandemics have instigated a new wave of memory themes and disputes.
Various memory narratives have been lately activated for numerous purposes, explaining warfare, justifying various politics, attempting to explain ongoing events, bolstering identities, and mobilizing for political positioning or activism. In this sense, the course will focus specifically on memories of care, and welfare in a broad sense both disciplinary (including, e.g., history, sociology, psychology, literature, arts, and heritage) and topics-wise (such as well-being now and then, Balkans, Holocaust, current wars) asking why we need memory and memory studies, and what kinds of roles does memory play in contemporary Europe.
The course introduces the main concept and approaches within memory studies relating them to reflect on care and welfare. Drawing on case studies from different European countries and regions, the course explores different ways of remembering Europe’s complicated past and investigates how these forms of remembering influence life, politics and culture across contemporary Europe. The aim of this course is to historicize the organization of care and welfare at national and transnational levels, to examine the transformative processes that have shaped the landscape of care in Europe and beyond, and to study the memories associated with these institutions, as well as the (collective) memory making processes that are fostered within them.

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