In this day and age, memories are shared less and less. Many of them feed identitarian thinking and, as a result, contribute to constructing the new walls that enclose our borders. Sometimes, memories are even exploited as new weapons. It is neither evident nor an established, irrevocable fact that memories are enhanced by maintaining links among themselves. It is a commitment, a critical position, and a multidirectional, transcultural, and transdisciplinary endeavor that Memories at stake endorses.

Memories at stake seeks to open a space for speech and thought; the committee that animates it even welcomes the contradictory debates that memory often generates. It is above all the project of a collective in motion. Even if the collective is primarily comprised of academics and intellectuals, it is also invested in engaging a broader public. Because for us, building bridges between research and society is not merely a wish made in vain, but one of the conditions that allows for a clear and critical approach to the stakes of memories in the world in which we live.

Questions of memory pass through and affect the whole of our society; for this reason they need to be approached from scholarly, artistic, and cultural perspectives. However, we must not give in to the temptation of journalistic reporting and sensational trends. Thus, the purpose of Memories at stake is to reflect on the conditions, situations, contexts, practices and evolution of memories within any given society, group or community, in Europe in particular, and in the world in general.

Memories aggregate around collective violence, because the culture in which we live and by which we construct our identity was founded by such violence. In that sense, the questions of memory about which we deliberate are associated with either historical violence (the domination, warfare, massacres, and genocide that have filled our history), or economic and political violence (the exiles, displaced populations, or migration flows that feed diasporas all over the world).

Because of this, Memories at stake, whose subtitle is “stakes of society,” considers memories as questions. It aims to problematize and analyse these stakes without reducing their complexity, a complexity that exceeds what we usually identify as “memory.” We will not pretend to be the provider of answers.