Transformative Memory International Network

The Transformative Memory International Network (TMIN) creates opportunities to rethink the experience, purpose, and process of memory as a transformative force in contexts of prolonged violence such as dictatorships, war, genocide, plantation slavery and settler colonialism. Memory is both a process of reckoning with the past and a domain for reparation and reconceptualization. It is a methodology of engagement that allows dynamic ways for survivors, relatives, activists, artists, and knowledge keepers to re-member, know, and reclaim the past. Memory work ranges from the documentation of facts, artifacts and stories in counter-archives, to the identification and recovery of victim’s bodies. The labours of memory may also include ceremony, song, dance, storytelling, and commemoration that nurtures and renews relationships between the human and the more-than-human worlds and the lands, trees, and waterways that hold and care for the missing and the missed. Drawing on Indigenous, Black and Global South knowledges, the TMIN situates the work of memory as a generative, living force located in the everyday worlds of survivors—a way to inhabit the present, to imagine new futures, and to challenge the status quo. Through asking what makes memory transformative, the proposed project offers a new methodology to interrogate the profoundly central role that memory plays in the transformation of systems of oppression and dispossession, and to contest dominant and exclusionary state narratives. The TMIN is an interdisciplinary collective of scholars, artists, and activists who are respected global leaders in historical memory work and in the promotion of justice and peace.