(preliminary description, may still be subject to later changes)
The analytical study of heritage and memory studies poses problems of method for all, from beginners to very experienced scholars. Due to its fundamental interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative nature, this seminar devises a specific format that explicitly addresses the methodological ins and outs of heritage and memory studies. We will critically discuss the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces and traces as well as the politics of memory, forgetting and heritage appropriations, significations, musealizations and mediatization in the present. How are key sites of heritage and memory in Europe and beyond presented, interpreted, and renegotiated? And how do memory discourses operate as vehicles of local, national, continental and global identity building? Key topics will address the contestation and (multi)directionality of heritage and memory as well as the theoretical implications of identity, trauma, conflict, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, landscapes and mass violence, heritage preservation and commemorations, experience and authenticity, (dark) tourism, diaspora and postcolonial memory, and performative reenactments and the art of absence and forgetting. The objectives are: 1) Introduce researchers to central concepts in the field of heritage and memory studies. 2) Provide training with samples from advanced theoretical texts (reading, understanding, discussing and integrating literature in the researchers’ own projects).
