Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change

About the SlowMemory COST Action

Slow memory is an emergent concept that is intended to help us think from new angles about how societies and individuals remember the pasts that meaningfully affect their present and future. It begins from the premise that we are quite skilled (and have much practice) commemorating sudden or extreme events such as wars, atrocities or catastrophes. But we are less certain about how to reckon with slow-moving transformations that may be just as impactful, such as climate change, deindustrialization, or the gradual expansion of social and political rights. Thus, both negative and positive change can happen without having a clear location or timeframe. This COST Action brings together scholars and practitioners from many different disciplines (humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, technologists) to consider how we may grasp the meaning slow processes, how we may remember slowly, and how we may study slow change and slow remembrance without feeling too much time pressure.

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Slow memory conceptualizes practices of remembrance that are ‘multi-sited’, ‘eventless’ and refer to slow-moving phenomena. But we are hampered in our ability to study these processes by a 24-hour news cycle coupled to a 24-hour academic assembly line. To succeed in this system we are expected to work at such a breakneck speed that it seems the only options are to keep the pace at an unsustainable rate or drop out. We believe there is another way that involves slowing down our research methods, processes and thinking. To this end, we propose the Cres Manifesto.

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