From July 14 until 18, 2025, the ninth annual Memory Studies Association (MSA) conference “Beyond Crises: Resilience and (In)Stability” took place in Prague, Czech Republic. Sabine Mannitz and other researchers from the Research Center „Transformations of Political Violence“ (TraCe) contributed to the conference program.
Astrid Erll (Goethe University Frankfurt) hosted the roundtable “Breaking down the silos: Collective memory research and the challenge of interdisciplinarity”. With their contribution about co-authoring as a decolonial strategy for scholarship in Memory Studies, Jephta Nguherimo (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Kaya de Wolff (Eberhard Karls University Tübingen) jointly contributed to the panel “Mediating postcolonial memory”. Moreover, Kaya de Wolff participated in the panel “Popularising difficult pasts: Walking tours at the intersection of memory activism, education and commerce”, where she presented a paper on Black-Indigenous places of memory in São Paulo.
Sabine Mannitz co-organized a panel together with PRIF Visiting Professor and TraCe Visiting Fellow A. Dirk Moses on “Transnational drivers and political divides in colonial genocide memory”. Sally Ghattas, Sabine Mannitz, and A. Dirk Moses, contributed to the panel. They presented their research on “Genocide Memory and Aboriginal Identity in Australia”, “Paths and Problems of Transitional Justice in Canada” and on current controversies about the applicability of the concept of genocide to the situation in Gaza.
Jona Schwerer (TU Darmstadt) and Sybille Frank (TU Darmstadt) presented their research on “Memorialising terrorist violence in urban public spaces” on the panel “Urban terrorism and memory in Europe”, which was co-organized by Katharina Karcher and Jona Schwerer.
Özge Özdemir (Goethe University Frankfurt) contributed to the panel “Remembering Exile” with her presentation titled “Exile, Memory and Belonging within Liminal Realms.”
The MSA annual conference aims to encourage the transdisciplinary exchange on memory and its social, cultural and public relevance. The 2025 conference took place at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in the historic city of Prague.
Further information can be found on the conference website.