Recontextualising Memory

A conference to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Graduate School in Language and Culture in Europe at Linköping University

Linköping, October 6-9, 2010

The Graduate School in Language and Culture in Europe started in 2000, with five doctoral students, three professors, and one administrator, for the purpose of providing a forum for research and graduate education in language and literature at Linköping University. Since then, twelve doctoral students have graduated from the school. Twelve more are now actively pursuing their thesis projects. We are now six professors, and our seminars also engage a good number of senior lecturers and assistant professors.

We take particular pride in our lively multi-disciplinary seminar tradition. The Graduate School is a place where linguists and literary scholars talk to each other, read each others’ texts, and cooperate, on, and in, many languages.

Any anniversary topicalises the notion of memory. What could then have been a more fitting celebration of our cross-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and multilingual school than a broad and critical discussion, from many different angles - an extended seminar in our own tradition - of the very notion of memory?

Memory is often thought of as a container, prompting questions about what goes in, what stays and what trickles out. In this conference, however, we wish to focus on memory as a public and observable accomplishment, within a variety of collective and individual practices that serve to create, sustain and transform cultural, textual, and conversational memory. The manifold ways in which memories, methods of remembering and intended public 'memory traces' can be linked in social practices have certainly been underestimated. A cultural memory is continuously transformed / translated into text and talk, which may in its turn promote further practices of appropriation and intervention. Through (repeated) decontextualisation and recontextualisation, memories are thus diffused as entrenched objects of specific practices into society and become vital resources for meaning-making.

These issues were discussed with a number of invited guests during four days, with erudition and insight, and in a warm and enthusiastic athmosphere.

Full program

Warm and cordial thanks to all of you who came here and made this conference such a memorable event!