THEME: Beyond Crises: Resilience and (In)stability

 WHEN: 14 - 18 July 2025

 WHERE: Prague, Czech Republic

 MODE: On-site only

Welcome to the official website of the 2025 MSA Annual Conference. The conference will 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 relevance. 

In 2025, we will globally commemorate many significant anniversaries, such as the end of World War II (1945) and the end of the Vietnam War (1975). We will mourn the victims of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia (1995) and the massacres in Sudan (2005). Additionally, we will be half a decade removed from the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns. With the theme Beyond Crises: Resilience and (In)stability, the conference seeks to explore how the memory of these events and other critical turning points has led to new tensions but also generated new possibilities. What patterns of decisive change can we observe? What is the role of memory in these processes, and how have they been commemorated? How have such critical turning points and their actors been collectively remembered and commemorated? And what can memory teach us amid the ongoing polycrisis?

Organized in the shadow of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the rise of populist and authoritarian tendencies all over the world, imminent climate collapse and humanitarian crises including ones in public health, Beyond Crises invites a multifaceted discussion on what memory scholars can learn from the memory of earlier crises and how that knowledge might be used to deal with ongoing political and social standoffs. Looking at shared and divided memoryscapes and the voices of marginalized communities, the conference will make a major contribution to the understanding of how societies remember and learn from crises.

The conference seeks to study, across different cultures and regions, the complex dynamics between remembering and forgetting, and between inclusion and exclusion, that take place in the aftermath of crisis.  We will address instances where such memory constellations have led to dead-ends or backlashes; but also cases where they feed into an ongoing quest for justice, peace, and societal well-being. By focusing on themes such as hope, resilience, and reconciliation, we aim to understand how, and in which circumstances, communities and individuals can recover and rebuild after turmoil. The conference will investigate how the memory of earlier crises has inspired movements for change and social justice. 

More concretely, the conference will encompass the following thematic strands:

• Anniversaries and their societal importance: Examining the politics of memory and commemoration practices both top-down and bottom-up.
• Digital Memories: Investigating the impact of digital technologies on memory formation, preservation, and dissemination.
• Economic Memories: Exploring the impact of collective memory on economic behavior, policy-making, and the socio-economic identities of communities.
• Environment: Examining how environmental changes and ecological memory shape collective and individual identities.
• Gender, Belonging, Embodiment: Examining how memory intersects with issues of gender, identity, and embodied experiences.
• Health, Welfare & Care: Reflecting on the memories associated with health, caregiving, and social welfare systems.
• History, Theory, and Methods of Memory Studies: Critically examining the foundational aspects of memory studies, focusing on the theoretical frameworks, historical contexts, and methodological approaches that shape the field.
• Human Rights & Civil Society: Analyzing memory's role in promoting and defending human rights and civil society initiatives.
• Humanitarianism & Philanthropy: Investigating the interplay between memory, humanitarian efforts, and philanthropic activities.
• Materiality and Nostalgia: Exploring the material aspects of memory and the sentimentality associated with nostalgia.
• Memory Education: Focusing on pedagogical approaches to teaching and transmitting memory.
• Memory Politics and Populism: Looking at the deployment of historical memories by both progressive and reactionary movements.
• Memoryscapes Shared and Divided: Studying the spatial and geographical dimensions of memory, including contested and shared spaces.
• Migration and Displacement: Investigating the memories of migration, displacement, and the diasporic experience.
• Notions of Crises: Exploring and interpreting the meaning of crisis within memory construction.
• Public and Private Memory: Analyzing the interplay between public commemorations and private recollections.
• Resilience, Reconciliation, Mourning: Discussing memory's contribution to processes of healing, reconciliation, and mourning.
• Transformation, Activism, Social Justice: Exploring the role of memory in social movements and transformative justice.
• Violence, Justice, Trauma: Addressing the memories of violence, justice processes, and trauma recovery.
• Voices of Memory: Highlighting underrepresented and marginalized narratives in the collective memory.
  

There will also be special events such as workshops, exhibitions and film screenings. To embed the conference in the beautiful city of Prague, we will also feature a cultural program (excursions and city walks) by cooperating closely with local memory activists, cultural partners and heritage sites.

In Prague, the conference will also host the MSA Forward postgraduate workshop. MSA Forward allows junior researchers to engage with other scholars in their field and receive feedback from established academics. As in previous years, we aim to provide a safe space for engaging in constructive discussions and an opportunity for networking and building lasting connections across disciplines.

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