Dear all,

As convenors of the "Unearthing Memories" Panel at the upcoming RAI 2020
Conference, *Anthropology and Geography**, *we are looking for
contributions by scholars who work on how diverse modes of engagements with
topographies are intricately and affectively related to
abjected/unaccounted collective memories. Striving to create an
interdisciplinary dialogue and discussion, we invite researchers from a
wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to, anthropology,
geography, architecture, and memory studies.

*Panel B10:*
*Unearthing Memories: Remembering and Forgetting as Subterranean Practices*

* Abstract*

Postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and feminist theorists have highlighted the
divergences between nationalist historiographies and other modalities of
remembering or forgetting. Challenging universalist and homogenous
approaches to time and narrative, these theorists have attended to the
localized, incoherent, and fragmented ways in which individual and/or
collective memories operate, citing as examples trauma victims or subaltern
communities whose relations to the past are severely curtailed through
colonial-modernist framings. This postcolonial, psychoanalytic and feminist
attention has been characteristically charged with material and spatial
import; place, geography, topography, objects and the body have been
explored as the media of the localizations, incoherences and fragmentations
in question.

Despite this interest in materiality and space, the conventions of
narrative-based remembering or forgetting have yet to be deprived of their
hegemonic status, as affective potentialities unassimilable within the
contours of memories *qua* narratives remain underexplored. This panel
seeks to explore these potentialities by focusing on how the topographies
and materialities in which one dwells affects the remembering or forgetting
of the past and the forgings of identity. It explores subterranean
modalities of remembering and forgetting as indicated not only by the
unearthly practices of magic, curse and haunting, but also by daily and
mundane—earthly—engagements such as farming and burial. The panel draws on
ethnographically grounded accounts that highlight how the practice of
unearthing—in both senses of rendering unearthly and digging up from the
earth—might offer a way into the analysis of publicly unacknowledged
histories of political violence, abjection, displacement, and destruction
as well as individual or collective struggles to assimilate them.

We particularly strive to explore
-      How places and materialities evoke pluritemporal sensations of the
past and issue forth corporeal, affective, and non-discursive engagements
with the past?
-      How and why these (un)earthly engagements generate both repulsion
and attraction, simultaneously both consolidating and destabilising
hegemonic narratives of the history?
-      How socioculturally-forged materialities are incorporated into
ecologies? Or, how ecological elements come to bear the potentiality to
radically alter the political?
-      What forms these marginal, evanescent, elusive and contingent
experiences take and in which ways they come to mediate between the present
and the past?
-      How the ‘unruliness’ of places or matter can be thought alongside
ethico-political interventions demanding recognition and justice?
-      How the potentialities arising from such mitigated sites and objects
are foreclosed, further ruined, and/or re-configured through spatial and
politico-economic interventions in the present?

We kindly ask those interested to submit their paper proposals here
<https://nomadit.co.uk/rai/rai2020/conferencesuite.php/paperproposal/8359>
 before  8 January, 2020. The conference is to take place on 4-7 June, 2020
in London.

In case you have any questions regarding the panel, please do not hesitate
to contact me [[log in to unmask]] or Dr Cayli [*[log in to unmask]*
<[log in to unmask]>
].

Kind regards,

-- 
Erol Saglam, PhD
[log in to unmask]

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