On behalf of the Global Memories Working Group, we are delighted to extend the invitation to submit abstracts for our dedicated panels at the next annual MSA conference in Lima, Peru, from 18 to 20 July 2024. This year’s conference is organized around the theme “Memories in Transit,” and seeks to facilitate discussions that engage in questions surrounding the role of memory in spaces, places, and processes of transition. As a collection of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds interested in how conceptions of the “global” shape—and are shaped by—memory formations from around the world, our group will host a range of presentations that highlight the breadth and generative potential that cohere in such lines of inquiry. For instance, how are memories globalized in relation to migration, refugee crises, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or South-South solidarities? What can we learn with regard to (de)colonization, neo-imperialism, and transnational social justice movements from investigating these processes? For this year’s conference, we are interested in thinking together about the productive tensions highlighted by examining global memory across areas of study that invoke questions of process, identity, theoretical approach, and scholarly method.

The routes taken by memories and memory cultures as they circulate physically, affectively, and conceptually harbor enormous potential for teaching us about the systems of connectivity that have shaped social life in the past and continue to do so. We believe that it is of paramount importance to analyze current and emerging forms of globality in a time when the connective tissue between us appears to be both a more dominant, and a more subtle, force than it has perhaps ever been. Global memories are not just ones which come from a wide array of geographical or transnational contexts, but also those that invite us to rethink our orthodox understanding of the “global” itself. If a wealth of scholarship in recent decades has focused on the ways in which processes of travel and transit open windows into the complexities of modernity, we ask what this means for us today in world cultures shaped by forces as distinct as physical displacement, conspicuous consumption of travel, and algorithmically-generated pathways of information flow. How does such a complex shape not only the way we think about memory and the global, but the methods we rely on to produce knowledge about them? While we are open to presentation proposals that take up any line of inquiry into the nature and function of global memory formations, we are especially interested in those that engage with any of the following themes:

- The relationship between movement and memory in and across global contexts
- Negotiations and conflicts created by processes of diaspora, migration, and travel
- Transitions undergone by memory formations during periods of social unrest, upheaval, and global change
- The relationship between conceptions of decolonization and transit as they relate to memory
- Linkages forged between and within memory constellations during periods of increased global movement
- Global memories of conflict, violence, and movements for social justice
- Peruvian and Latin American memory cultures

Next year’s annual meeting in Lima is planned as a fully in-person event, and we ask that those interested in submitting proposals commit to traveling to Peru to attend. Unfortunately, we cannot accept requests for virtual presentations in any form.

Submissions will be accepted until Sunday, 3 December 2023. Proposals for papers should be no more than 250 words, and must include a title and abstract. A short bio of 100 words or less should also be submitted at the same time. Please send all proposals to globalmemoriesworkinggroup@gmail.com. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out no later than 10 December, 2023.

Co-Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Jarula M.I. Wegner, Zhejiang University
Dr. Christian Alvarado, University of California, Davis