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Who's afraid of collective Memory?

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Nottingham Trent University invites you to participate in Who's Afraid of Collective Memory?

  • When: Wednesday 26 April 2023, 5.30 pm
  • Registration: 5-5.15 pm
  • Location: Lecture Theatre 5, Goldsmith Street, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, NG1 4BU
  • Booking deadline: Wednesday 26 April 2023, 5.30 pm
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Event details

Common sense, including among scholars, is that memory is fundamentally an individual faculty. If so, collective memory must largely be a metaphor, and one must be careful not to treat groups as if they have faculties like memory or mind. Whether or not such a view is defensible, treatments of “collective memory” as real are strongly defended against, though not always accurately and with good reason.  In this talk, I explore the political and cultural anxieties that lead to straw man accounts of collective memory, and seek to show some of the analytical costs such defenses exact on empirical understanding of collective memory as shared culture.

Speakers: Jeffrey K Olick, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Virginia and Co-President of the Memory Studies Association

Professor Olick is a cultural and historical sociologist whose work has focused on collective memory and commemoration, critical theory, transitional justice, postwar Germany, and sociological theory more generally. He is the author of The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method (2016), The Politics of Regret (2007), In the House of the Hangman (2005), and the co-editor of A Cultural History of Memory, as well as new translations and critical editions of two books by Maurice Halbwachs.

Programme

17:30 - Light refreshments

18:00 - Introduction by Professor Edward Peck

18:15 - Lecture by Professor Olick "Who is Afraid of Collective Memory?” and Q & A

19:15 - Drinks reception

19:45 - Close

Location details

Address:

Goldsmith Street
 Nottingham
 Nottinghamshire
 NG1 4BU

Past event

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