Interdisciplinary conference

Keynote Speakers:
Professor Elazar Barkan, Columbia University
Professor Steve J. Stern, University of Wisconsin-Madison
and others

The past few years have seen a plethora of case studies about attempts to deal with past injustice. Scholars have explored the work of truth commissions, the effects of apologies, debates over reparations, and trials of individual perpetrators, to name but four key themes. At the same time, there has been a burgeoning of studies about how past injustice is remembered (or forgotten) and memorialised. This conference provides a unique opportunity to link these two areas of research and to ask questions such as: To what extent is historical justice predicated on particular memories, on particular forms of remembering or on the forgetting of a particular past? How do apologies or truth commissions, for example, shape social memories of past injustice?

This conference aims to bring together scholars working on historical justice and on memory. It is trying to promote conversations across disciplinary boundaries – for example, between historians and lawyers, anthropologists and philosophers, sociologists and cinema studies scholars, heritage scholars and psychologists, human geographers and political scientists – and across national boundaries: bringing together, say, a historian working on memories of the 1965 violence in Indonesia with a lawyer doing research on the South African truth commission, and an anthropologist doing fieldwork in Romania with somebody analysing novels written in post-Pinochet Chile.

We invite proposals for:

1. Papers about any issue related to historical justice and/or the transition to democracy, and/or memory in societies striving for historical justice;

2. Panels (particularly those that bring together scholars working on different parts of the world and/or from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds); and

3. Workshops (which could be closed or open to others, and which would usually bring together scholars whose papers have been circulated before the conference).

We welcome proposals from scholars, artists, activists, and representatives from NGOs and IGOs.

Deadline for abstracts: 3 June 2011

Please direct all enquiries, and send abstracts, to: Dr Martine Hawkes, mhawkes@swin.edu.au