Members of this research cluster explore the status of memory as an object of investigation in feminist theory and as a contested form of social, cultural and political practices. There is much at stake in how we remember and memorialize forms of political violence and the effects and consequences of such trans/national traumas. Whether encoded in truth and reconciliation commissions, in testimonies by women survivors, in Rest in Peace murals created by ‘inner city’ youth, in photographs of the disappeared carried in protest by survivors and family members, in memorials to those who have been lost to violence, in plays and films that enact histories of colonial violence, exclusion, and containment, or in other myriad forms of invoking historical memory and amnesia, memory projects are simultaneously contestations of and collusions with forms of hegemonic power. Indeed feminist, indigenous and critical race scholars, as well as artists, filmmakers and other producers of culture, have attempted to disrupt hegemonic power by excavating memories of epistemic and physical violence. At the same time, hegemonic forces often appropriate such projects of recreating histories. Such complex and often gendered histories suggest that we need to critically interrogate how memory projects are created, by whom, and to what ends. Members of this research cluster seek to explore memory as a form of politics in which different domains of knowledge and experience are brought together in unpredictable ways.
Members of this research cluster have met for three years – during which it has organized a research symposium, lectures by international scholars at York University and panels at feminist conferences. The cluster currently has a monthly reading group. Through collaborative and individual projects, they contribute to deeper understandings of significant issues and questions in the field. Faculty and students in the group come from York University, but also from other institutions in Canada and internationally. They represent a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including sociology, gender and women studies, fine arts, environmental studies, Latin American Studies, South Asian Studies.
This research cluster has a number of goals:
- Thinking through the relationship between memory and memorialization to explore a wide range of memory projects as they reconfigure, perform and transform (transnational) relations of power between individuals, communities, and the state in the aftermath of violence.
- Analyzing critically the process of memorialization.
- Examining feminist (re)constructions of memory. How memory projects can be acts of resistance and contestation to the hegemonic when they seek to excavate and make known knowledge, experiences and forms of agency that have been hidden in history, reshaping and reimagining our understandings of history and subjectivity by bringing to the fore what the past means to those who have experienced its oppression
- Facilitating collaboration with scholars nationally and internationally.
News
Coming February 2025 from Rutgers University Press!
Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections
Edited by Alison Crosby & Heather Evans
Memorializing Violence brings together feminist and queer reflections on the transnational lives of memorialization practices, asking what it means to grapple with loss, mourning, grief, and desires to collectively remember and commemorate–as well as urges to forget–in the face of disparate yet entangled experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. The volume uses a transnational feminist approach to ask, How do such efforts in seemingly unconnected remembrance landscapes speak to, with, and through each other in a world order inflected by colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics, structures, and strictures? How do these memorializing initiatives not only formulate within but move through complex transnational flows and circuits, and what transpires as they do? What does it mean to inhabit loss, mourning, resistance, and refusal through memorialization at this moment, and what’s at stake in doing so? What might transnational feminist analyses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation have to offer in this regard?
Featuring work by Carmela Murdocca, Amber Dean, Karine Duhamel, Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, María de los Ángeles Aguilar, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Shahrzad Mojab, Chowra Makaremi, Ayu Ratih, Honor Ford-Smith, Juanita Stephen, Erica S. Lawson, Ola Osman, Alma Cordelia Rizzo Reyes, Charlotte Henay, Camille Turner & Mila Mendez
Cluster Members
Alison Crosby
Associate Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University
Alison Crosby is an Associate Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, where she was the Director of the Centre for Feminist Research from 2014-19. Her research uses a transnational feminist lens and participatory methodologies to accompany protagonists’ multifaceted struggles to redress and memorialize colonial racialized gendered violence in Guatemala, where she has worked for almost three decades. She is the author, with M. Brinton Lykes, of Beyond repair? Mayan women’s protagonism in the aftermath of genocidal harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), published in Spanish as Más allá de la reparación: Protagonismo de mujeres mayas en las secuelas del daño genocida (Cholsamaj, 2019).
Malathi de Alwis
Visiting Faculty, University of Colombo
Malathi de Alwis has published widely on social movements associated with ‘disappearances’ as well as on nationalism, militarism, displacement, suffering, and memorialisation. Her most recent publication, Archive of Memory (2019), curated and edited with Hasini Haputhanthri, and simultaneously published in English, Sinhala and Tamil, offers a people’s object-related history of the past 70 years of independence in Sri Lanka. A section of this work is currently touring the island as part of the ‘It’s About Time’ travelling history museum. Malathi leads ‘memory walks’ around Colombo and has collaborated on a ‘memory map’ to document sites of violence across Sri Lanka.
Heather Evans
PhD Candidate, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, York University
Heather Evans is a doctoral candidate in the Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies program at York University. Their research broadly draws on transnational feminist theory and memory studies to examine how militarized sexual harm and racialized, gendered resistance are constructed through the transnational memorialization practices of the “comfort women” movement. Their work is informed by 13 years of experience as an activist, researcher and educator with the “comfort women” movement in the South Korean and Canadian contexts, as well as nearly a decade of academic research on memorialization landscapes and critical interrogations of human trafficking and modern slavery discourses.
Honor Ford-Smith
Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University
Honor Ford-Smith is a scholar, theatre worker and poet. She was educated in Jamaica at St Andrew High School and after studying theatre began teaching at the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston. She became co-founder and artistic director of Sistren (Sisters), a theatre collective of mainly working-class Jamaican women that works in community theatre and popular education. Ford-Smith moved to Toronto, Canada in 1991, receiving her doctorate in education from the University of Toronto in 2004. She continues to write, to work in performance and to teach at York University in Toronto where she is an Associate Professor in the Community Arts Practice program under the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
Shahrzad Mojab
Professor, Adult Education and Community Development & Women and Gender Studies, OISE/University of Toronto
Shahrzad Mojab, scholar, teacher, and activist, is internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, and violence on women’s learning and education; gender, state, migration and diaspora; Marxist feminism and anti-racism pedagogy. She is professor of Adult Education and Community Development and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the Director of Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, a former Director of the Women and Gender Institute, University of Toronto and the recipient of the 2020 Canadian Association of Studies in Adult Education Lifetime Achievement Award and the Royal Society of Canada Award in Gender Studies in 2010.
Carmela Murdocca
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, York University
Carmela Murdocca is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University and is appointed to graduate programs in Sociology, Socio-Legal Studies and Social and Political Thought. Her research examines racialization, criminalization and ongoing social histories of racial and colonial violence. Her work is particularly concerned with the intersections of racial carceral violence and the social and legal politics of repair, redress, and reparations.