Workshop - Critical Thinking on Human Rights and Memory, 2018, Dublin, Ireland
Dublin City University (DCU)
Private University-State-recognized University-, Browse similar opportunities
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Private University-State-recognized University-, Browse similar opportunities
Dates: 6-7 February 2019
Venue: UCD Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland
Deadline for abstract submission: 15 September 2018 Notification of outcomes: 15 November 2018
Organisers: Human Rights and Memory Working Group (Memory Studies Association) and UCD Humanities Institute and the School of Sociology Keynote speaker: Carol Kidron, Anthropology Department, Haifa University
Short description:
‘Human rights’ developed historically as a critique of power but gradually came to be embedded in global governance, transforming into a powerful force. Both human rights and memory discourses grew out of legal, moral and philosophical discourses about genocide and rights violations after WWII. Memory has been invoked as a necessary foundation for human rights discourse and to laws that uphold human rights. The last few decades have witnessed the proliferation of a human rights memorialization agenda and the rise of memorialization standards and policy-oriented attempts to engage societies around the globe (in particular post-conflict and transitional spaces) to develop and adopt specific normative forms of remembrance. This has numerous implications not only for current global politics but also for our day-to-day lives. Those forms of human rights memorialization are based and developed, first and foremost, on various idealistic assumptions, such as the belief that the memory of genocide as ‘a crime against humanity’ might prevent future genocides from happening, often ascribing a panacea effect to “proper memorialization”. The emergence of the standardization of memory is based on the assumption that remembering past human rights abuses in a particular way is effective in promoting universalist human rights values in conflict and postconflict settings. The attempts to incorporate memorialization processes as an integral part of the human rights regime is due to the radical jump from a ‘duty to remember’, as a notion that was meant to bring debates over contested pasts into the public sphere, to a policyoriented ‘proper way of remembrance’, designed and envisioned through the normative standardization of memory. “Standardization of memory” refers to the historical generative process of the development of a standardized set of norms, promoted through the human rights infrastructures of world polity, that prescribes for societies how to deal with the legacies of mass human rights abuses. Over time, this shift from ‘duty to remember’ as an awareness-oriented process to a policy-oriented, normative ‘proper way of remembrance’ provided a set of policies and a tool kit of practices that aims to advance the human rights vision of memorialization processes as a means of promoting democratic, human rights values across the globe.
Aims of the workshop:
• To critically explore the genealogical foundations and assumptions of the historical intersections between human rights and memory.
• To understand the context of, the reasons for, and the impact of the shift from ‘duty to remember’ as an awareness-oriented process to a policy-oriented, ‘proper way of remembrance’.
• To understand, explain and define “standardization of memory” from the historical, regional, cultural and political perspective.
• To distinguish and conceptualize the impact human rights memory activism and its normative application has, on the ground, for critical, value-neutral thinking.
• To explore the main human rights memorialization assumptions and their effects on the ground in particular in relation to production of simplified categories such as victims, perpetrators, bystanders, trauma, reconciliation, etc.
• To assess the role of discursive practices, as opposed to material environments, in processes of standardization of memory around the globe.
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