Time, In­her­it­ance and Memory: an in­ter­dis­cip­lin­ary re­search sem­in­ar

In this seminar, we explore questions around time, inheritance, and memory. 

Five distinguished scholars will share their work and reflect on the tensions and resonances that emerge between and across their presentations. Set in different contexts, their projects explore various themes: the inheritances of the industrial revolution, family histories, psychiatric care, colonial relations, the pasts, present and futures of young women at the margin, education policy, and feminism and occupational histories and identities. What counts as ‘empirics’ or ‘epistemological entry point’ is equally varied: stories told, narratives built, secrets kept, spaces felt, artworks crafted, diaries passed down through generations, tears shed, shivering spines, and silences, absences, and gaps that resist being filled. Through their work, we will explore what it means to conjure traces of pasts that were never present. What it means to engage with time, inheritance and memory as spectral traces that inhere in feelings and intensities, in bodies, spaces, objects, relations, and in language and written words. Giving us a glimpse into their careful methodological, theoretical, and analytical labour, our presenters will offer their takes on how to register and stay with those traces, not to retrieve the past, but to open the present and future to new interpretations. 

Threaded through their inquiries is a shared concern with time, inheritance, and memory as never entirely our own; as exceeding the conventional boundaries of the individual.

We will explore questions such as:

• How is memory shaped by those who witness and interpret it?
• How do physical spaces and material objects affect how memory is felt and expressed?
• What can silence, absence or erasure tell us about the past?
• And what does it mean to inherit the past as a call to rethink the future?

 Join us as we raise such questions and explore them carefully in ways that keep them alive and always open to other possible answers.

You will gain insight into how researchers work with diverse forms of empirical material - from narratives and diaries to artworks, spaces and absences - and how these materials challenge traditional ways of understanding memory and time.

Speakers

• Nancy Harding, Professor, University of Bath
• Signe Ravn, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne
• Steven Brown, Professor, Nottingham Trent University
• Dorthe Staunæs, Professor, Aarhus University
• Justine Grønbæk Pors, Professor, Copenhagen Business School

Programme

Welcome 

Presentations

• “The inheritance of the Industrial Revolution? Violence, hierarchy, domination and control in the emergence of the organizational unconscious” / with Nancy Harding
• “Sticky pasts, obstructed futures? Unpacking the pull of the past in the lives of young women on the margins” / with Signe Ravn
• “Crafting the past: Artwork in psychiatric contexts as a mediator of memory” / with Steven D Brown

Short break

• “Haunting/haunted split-seconds: Time, colonial relations and implicatedness” / with Dorthe Staunæs
• “Inherited time: Remembering the future of the welfare state” / with Justine Grønbæk Pors

Panel discussion and Q&A / with the speakers