Women's Memory-Work: Gendered Dilemmas of Social Transformation 24-26 August 2010

Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 16 April 2010

http://www.ul.ie/womensmemory/

The 3-day international conference seeks to explore women-centered expressions of historical experience as fertile ground for cultural agency and social transformation in national and transnational socioeconomic and political arenas.

One of the key issues raised in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and again in Resolution 1820 (2008) concerns the “urgent need to mainstream a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations” so as to assist a gender-sensitive implementation of national stability and peace. The aim of this project is to generate a transnational dialogue among scholars, activists and artists, whose aim is to evoke just such a perspective by reflecting on women’s production of and participation in public and collective commemoration rituals in polities emerging from conflict, or remaining entangled in dilemmas of uneven historical and political representation and economic/territorial disparities.

Accordingly, the objectives of this project are as follows:

1. To create a forum for the discussion and comparative exploration of women’s roles in the transmission and
    representation of memories of repression and conflict.
2. To foster the collaboration between activists, scholars and artists in reconfiguring women’s agency in political and
    social exercises of reparation and reconciliation.
3. To construct a theoretical paradigm of the dynamics of gendered memory in transitional, post-transitional and
    reconstructive political processes internationally.
4. To assess the significance of popular cultural practices in the construction and affirmation of collective memories
    of the past.