Call For Papers

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the international conference, A Mnemonic Turn and the Future of Democratic Politics, scheduled for April 24-25, 2025. We hope the conference will contribute to a discussion on the vital yet complex and tense relationship between collective memory and democracy today.
The recent consideration of the “mnemonic turn” (Olick 2023), implies a major change in how societies view, study, represent, and instrumentalize the past in service of both the present and the future. The conference aims to discuss further how collective memory engages the actors, adjusts structures, and penetrates mechanisms of democratic politics, revealing its double — both constructive and destructive — potential. Moreover, reflection on the relationship between memory and democracy remains equally significant in the context of contemporary non-democratic and violent regimes, where the past is increasingly employed as a tool of war propaganda and to limit freedoms.

BACKGROUND:
In recent decades, there has been a significant breakthrough in recognizing the importance of collective memory in understanding historical and social phenomena, as well as in shaping contemporary political life. The rapidly growing field of memory studies has absorbed phenomena, concepts, and approaches that relate to the reconstruction and representation of the past for individuals and societies, such as oral history, autobiography, myth, tradition, memorialization, and commemorations. Consequently, memory has evolved into a “metahistorical category” that encompasses and integrates a wide range of disciplines dealing with the past, including history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literary studies, all of which engage with processes of remembering and reconstructing the past (Klein 2000).
The quest for a shared history and identity serves as an essential mechanism for marginalized groups to demand recognition, reparations, and institutional reforms, ultimately pressing for the democratization of memory, greater transparency, justice, and inclusive politics to safeguard against authoritarianism.
Collective memory is crucial for confronting difficult pasts by upholding the moral imperative “never again.” Mass atrocities during WWII in Europe and the Far East, in Latin America and Africa, as well as in recent wars and conflicts, such as Ukraine and the Middle East, are crucial for understanding the need for democracy. This includes the crimes committed by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes against their own societies and the memory of unprosecuted and unpunished crimes.
Memorial culture may reinforce democratic values and moral principles of justice, equality, and human rights by building mnemonic infrastructures—national monuments, museums, and commemorations of pivotal historical events. However, memory can also act as a divisive force within democratic societies. Contentious and contested narratives of an “unmastered past” (Olick 2023), involving deeply troubling colonial experiences, slavery, authoritarianism, dictatorship, ethnic and religious conflicts, and crimes, can polarize societies when these legacies have not been fully processed, acknowledged, or reconciled. “Memory wars” often challenge social cohesion and fuel intense debates about identity and belonging, resulting in the political exclusion and marginalization of certain groups and communities. We aim to address unresolved aspects of the past, such as the lack of accountability for oppressive regimes, insufficient reckoning with authoritarian crimes, and incomplete historical justice in many contexts worldwide. Our focus is on how these unaddressed legacies continue to shape current challenges and socio-political dynamics across different regions.
Collective memory is an essential but contested element of social life, capable of both sustaining and challenging democratic institutions and processes. It can activate public debates on social justice, rights, freedoms, and equality and assist citizens in enacting democracy, but it can also be used and abused for political gain. Democracy Dies in Darkness — reads the wise motto adopted by the Washington Post in 2017. The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, may have shown some foresight when he stated, “Certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light.” The task of our conference is to shed light on our past and illuminate our present and future. We hope that you can join us in this endeavor.


THE CONFERENCE: proposed themes and submission details
This year’s conference will engage with the proposed wide-ranging theme of A Mnemonic Turn and the Future of Democratic Politics, accommodating a variety of issues particularly relevant to the current pressing concerns of collective memory and democracy. These issues include, but are not limited to:
• The democratic potential of memory politics
• The role of both social and academic institutions in shaping collective memory
• The emergence of repressed or unmastered pasts
• Transitional justice and memory politics
• The intersection of demos and ethnos in shaping new mnemonic practices
• The crisis of the post-WWII moral and memory consensus: How does the politics of forgetting fuel the resurgence of authoritarian governments?
• The authoritarian appropriation of memory politics
• The transformative power of public discourse
• Decolonization and memory: reclaiming the past as a form of identity politics
• The upsurge of memory movements and mnemonic practices
• The emergence of grassroots memory representations and resistance movements
• Challenges posed by the mnemonic turn and the prevalence of post-truth narratives
• The question of unfinished/incomplete historical narratives: the interplay between memory and history
• Memory, geopolitics, and democracy


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
We welcome submissions from advanced graduate students, scholars, artists, and memory activists interested in presenting their reflections, artifacts, or performances relevant to the conference topics.
Please send your proposals (title and abstract at max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) to memorystudies@newschool.edu by December 15, 2024. Applicants will be informed of a decision by January 15, 2025.
For those accepted, final papers (or presentations) will be due two weeks before the conference.
The conference will be in person only and open to the public (with RVSP).

Call for Articles for the: Journal for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe
Special Issue 7 (2026): “Magic Mountains of the East. Sanatoria as real and imaginative spaces” Editor: Ekkehard Haring (BKGE, Oldenburg)

The history of European sanatoria has increasingly become a focus of academic research in recent years. Research into the history of medicine and science, as well as sociology, has provided a wide range of insights into the development of their institutionalisation. At the same time, cultural studies, especially literary studies, have investigated the sanatorium as a heterotopic space (Foucault) and the narrative and semantic overlaps between literature and illness.

A prominent example of this is Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, which became a paradigm for literary history and thus, as it were, for the literary accreditation of the sanatorium as the setting for a modern (Western) consciousness of crisis. For Mann, as for many other diagnosticians of social upheaval, the grey area between salvation and disaster provided an ideal starting point for placing individual crises at the centre of general human observations. The fact that the heterotopia of the ‘sanatorium’ is not just an aesthetic construct, but has been a widespread real lifeworld since the middle of the 19th century with a broad variety of forms (therapeutic services, concepts, practices and regimes), ideological framings, spatial conceptualisations and specific socio-cultural profiles, has been clearly described in a large number of exemplary studies.

So far, the focus has primarily been on Central and Western Europe. However, there are significant blind spots when it comes to Eastern Europe. Here too, sanatoria such as in Silesian Görbersdorf (Sokołowsko) or Bohemian Frankenstein (Rumburk-Podhájí) played a key role in the realisation of therapeutic or other healing processes. Furthermore, the sanatoria built on the Black Sea coast in the USSR, even with regulated access, were intended to serve the working people as spaces for health regeneration, community building and social vision. However, sanatoria also became the scenes of social discourse independent of state health policy, and inspired writers as can be variously seen, for example, in the works of Max Blecher, Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokarczuk. Whether as a healing refuge of consolidation and regeneration or as an institution of internment and repression, as an authentic world of experience or as a visionary projection space, as a real institution or as poetic fiction, the complex ambivalences and contexts addressed by the topos ‘sanatorium’ should be analysed.

With this special issue of the JKGE, we would like to take a closer look at the complex significance of sanatoria in Eastern Europe from the perspective of cultural, medical and social history, as well as architecture studies, film studies, art history, literature studies and political science. Possible topics may include:
- The historical development and significance of sanatoria; presentations or comparisons of sanatoria; sanatoria as places of cultural diversity, remembrance, shared heritage or as sites of medical discourses, practices, applications, cure plans, regimes and innovations.
- Actors and networks: founding personalities and their guiding principles, medical and therapeutic staff, patients.
- Lifeworld aspects: Sanatoria as spaces of (self-)discipline and collective adaptation, as open/closed institutions, as places of internment/repression, as transit spaces or social meeting places; as spaces of architecture and artistic design.
- Influences of political and social changes; the sanatorium as a visionary space for utopias/dystopias and social diagnoses; connections to different healing contexts (e.g. natural healing and life reform movements); aspects of gender and race studies.
- Representation in literature, film and art: the sanatorium as a narrative, as an epistemic spatial metaphor, as a heterotopia or as a small ‘theatre of life’ (theatrum mundi); sanatoria as places of memory/reconstruction of life history.

Please send, by 20 January 2025, an abstract of the (unpublished) article you are proposing, in German or English (max. 2,500 characters, incl. spaces), together with a brief biographical note. E-mail to the JKGE editorial office (redaktion@bkge.uni-oldenburg.de).

The articles of max. 50,000 characters selected for publication must be submitted, in German or English, by 1 November 2025. They will be subjected to a double-blind peer review before being published in the JKGE online in open access and in print by DeGruyter-Verlag in autumn 2026.