Memory and Temporality
Memory constructions are approached based on experiences lived in historically situated circumstances. The focus is on examining the specificities of mnemonic compositions in interaction with interests and values that operate within games of forgetting and remembering.
Central to this approach is the theoretical and methodological treatment of memory as an object of historical reflection. Accordingly, studies that problematize the mechanisms through which certain uses of the past are articulated in demands anchored in an equally determined present are valued. This includes approaches to topics related to cultural heritage, inventories, collections, museums, libraries, as well as traditions, habits, oralities, material culture, historical writing, and regimes of historicity.
The social constitution of temporalities encompasses the various ways in which sites of memory are composed, in their broad diversity, ranging from more institutional or administrative dynamics to movements of everyday invention. The construction of meanings for the past, across diverse territories and multiple relationships, becomes a field of investigation intimately connected with the ways historical subjects (re)create and experience agreements and conflicts in social relations.
In the multiple connections between the individual and the collective, memory work—when examined within the complexity of social life—implies experiences articulated with uses of the past, as a possibility to present events that convey senses of continuity or rupture, including perspectives on identity dynamics and relations of belonging. Thus, interpretative procedures capable of interrogating experiences that attribute meanings and utilities to the past for the present are especially valued.
Alongside the problematization of writing and orality operations, attention is drawn to the devices of remembrance in the historicity of material objects, preserved in memory sites or everyday situations, treated as a varied set of practices that constitute divisions and valuations of the relations between present experiences and recoveries of the past. This opens the possibility of studies on memories of the body and of techniques, understood as significant components of the ways temporalities are invented, which in specific situations claim notions such as delay, progress, ancient, modern, tradition, innovation, decay, and so on.
