Friday, May 6, 2011

Emerging Scholars Workshop: Historical Justice and Memory

Via H-Net, we have word of an Emerging Scholars Workshop on Historical Justice and Memory at Swinburne University of Technology. Here's the announcement:

We invite PhD students working on historical justice and memory to submit proposals for papers to be discussed in an emerging scholars workshop on 13 and 14 February 2012, and to be presented during the Historical Justice and Memory conference.

Interested students ought to send a detailed abstract, a synopsis of their research project and a CV to Dr Martine Hawkes by 3 June 2011. We expect to be able to subsidise the attendance of participants chosen to attend the emerging scholars workshop.

Here's more information about the conference:

The past few years have seen a plethora of case studies about attempts to deal with past injustice. Scholars have explored the work of truth commissions, the effects of apologies, debates over reparations, and trials of individual perpetrators, to name but four key themes. At the same time, there has been a burgeoning of studies about how past injustice is remembered (or forgotten) and memorialised. This conference provides a unique opportunity to link these two areas of research and to ask questions such as: To what extent is historical justice predicated on particular memories, on particular forms of remembering or on the forgetting of a particular past? How do apologies or truth commissions, for example, shape social memories of past injustice?

This conference aims to bring together scholars working on historical justice and on memory. It is trying to promote conversations across disciplinary boundaries – for example, between historians and lawyers, anthropologists and philosophers, sociologists and cinema studies scholars, heritage scholars and psychologists, human geographers and political scientists – and across national boundaries: bringing together, say, a historian working on memories of the 1965 violence in Indonesia with a lawyer doing research on the South African truth commission, and an anthropologist doing fieldwork in Romania with somebody analysing novels written in post-Pinochet Chile.