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Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change

Latest Updates

The Memory Studies Association invites proposals for its ninth annual conference, to be held from 14 to 18 July 2025 at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in the historic city of Prague. This on-site conference aims to carry over from earlier conferences a transdisciplinary conversation on memory and its social, cultural and public...

Call for Articles Slow Memory: The Transformative Promptings of Literature in Post-conflict Societies for a special issue of Memory Studies Review (2026)edited by Patrick Crowley and Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir ‘I feel something quiver in me, shift, try to rise, something that seems to have been unanchored at a great depth; I do not know what it...

  Workshop: Walkability between the Past and Present   Organized by Diana Salahieh, Layla Zibar, Ph.D., Akshatha Ravi Kumar and doc. ing. arch. Irena Fialova  In collaboration with Prof. Kateřina Králová, from the Research Center for Memory Studies (RCMS) at Charles University  The event will take place in Prague from September 11-14, 2024, focusing on...

The second training school & third annual meeting for the “Slow Memory – Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerated Change” COST action took place in Belgrade, Serbia during the last week of May 2024, at the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK). We had 34 participants in the training school and 60 for...

Image 13: Part of the massive monument in Batina

Call for articles for the Special Issue  Slow Memory After Conflict: Fragments From the Post- Yugoslav Space  Editors: Orli Fridman and Vjeran Pavlakovic  Rationale  Inspired by the COST Action on Slow Memory, we are pleased to announce a call for papers to a special issue of the journal Southeastern Europe that will critically engage with...

Editors: Gruia Badescu, University of KonstanzMaija Spurina, Latvian Academy of CultureChristian Wicke, Utrecht University Cities have been studied as arenas of diverse memory politics, as well as palimpsests where long-term political and social changes can be uncovered through the purposeful illumination of multiple layers of memory (Huyssen 2003). Urban life has been long associated with...

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.

Meet our
Working Groups

WG1: Transformation of Work examines the decline of large-scale industry and the changing nature of the modern workplace, which has had significant effects on local communities and on individuals’ life perspectives. It seeks to develop slow memory concepts in relation to socio-economic analysis through exploring how remembrance practices can make visible economic transitions that are experienced unevenly and gradually. It brings methodological approaches to economic modelling and trends into dialogue with oral history techniques to develop new modes of narrating and visualising socio-economic change.
The current transformation of social welfare and growing inequalities in a slowly deteriorating care system lead us to seek a deeper understanding of how the future aspirations of community members are shaped and how these can be mediated through the practice of remembering. Bringing them together is the aim of WG2.
Though extremism may be on the rise on both ends of the political spectrum, the mobilisation of right-wing forces in a diverse set of countries poses a particular threat to democratic systems of governance and to inclusive political cultures. WG3 will analyse these threats through the lens of memory studies in three ways. First, right-wing and anti-democratic actors skilfully employ the politics of memory to persuade supporters and to drive societal actors into particular policy directions.
Societies gradually emerging from violent conflict face multiple challenges when it comes to dealing with the transgressions of the past and rebuilding the future. The overwhelmingly dominant approach in contemporary conflict resolution is to confront memories and narratives of conflict with a view to find consensus and promote reconciliation. This working group aims to develop ways of creating space for bringing together diverging circumstances, perspectives, experiences and practices into continued contestation and open-ended dialogues. We conceptualize the “slow transformation of conflict” as a form of peacebuilding, which is always a process, never an event.
WG5 will progress the conceptualization of slow environmental remembrance by drawing on the expertise and experience of stakeholder practitioners (e.g. environmental action groups, artists, curators, and museums). The resulting transdisciplinary dialogues between theory and practice will conceive of ways that environmental crisis can be remembered in radically expanded timeframes, laying the memorial foundations for future environmental policy work, and the theoretical foundations for analysing the forms, ethics, and politics of memory work that addresses the climate and ecological emergency.
How do global and local societies confront their past? How to they contend with current environmental, economic and social change? These are some of the main questions WG6 aims to tackle through collaborative exchanges and cooperation. We would like to create a shared understanding of slow memory as an approach and methodology more specifically utilized as a tool in comprehending to global and local grand-scale transformations and responding to their urgency and exigency .
WG7 is chaired by the Science Communication Manager and will ensure that the Action has a clear online profile and communication strategy. It will also have overall responsibility for updating and implementing the dissemination plan.
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