Contained Memory Conference (New Zealand)

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Contained Memory Conference 2010

The conference seeks to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives in a discourse on contained memory. While memory is understood to be integral to the constitution of the self, it works in concert with external repositories of memory ranging from personal mnemonic objects to collective, social, and public memory residing in community traditions, artifacts in museums, and archives, including electronic and other recording systems. Memory is embodied in intergenerational rituals and practices and intangible forms of storytelling, song, and performance, as well as in natural elements and the physical memory forms of monuments and memorials.

Although there are distinct ways of thinking about or containing memory, the edges of containment are porous, enabling encounters between different expressions of memory. By encompassing a wide variety of ways of conceiving memory through different cultural and theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds, it is hoped this conference can build a nexus of contained memories. Papers may originate from a variety of knowledge sources including (but not limited to): anthropology, archeology, art history/criticism, communication studies, cultural studies, customary knowledge, ethnography, film/video studies, fine/visual art, history, geography, landscape architecture, literary theory, material culture studies, memory studies, museum studies, musicology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, performance/theatre, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, psychology, rhetorical studies, sociology, and visual culture studies.

Possible Contained Memory sessions:
The Land / Earth / Landscape

— The expression of memory in personified land and landscape features; cultural erasure and renaissance
— Diaspora: the threat of memory loss following migration and the preservation of intergenerational memory expressed physically through photographs, diaries, and artifacts, and the intangible or ephemeral qualities of dance, theatre, and songs from “home”
— Sites of trauma
— Genealogy / whakapapa
Containing public memory

—Museums, records, archives, memorials, oral histories and mnemonic devices
—Transmission, preservation, mutability of memory
Rituals of memory

— Enacting / performing of memory “acts”
— Mimetic performance
— Narratives, mythology / folklore, and cosmologies
Site / Space / Time

— Bodily memory expressed through performance and ritual
— Interaction between the present and the past
Memory and the senses

— Phenomenology of the senses
— Music / sound
Autobiography

— Externalization of personal memory in art forms
The human mind

— The nature of memory and the definition of self; cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology
— Psychoanalysis; forgetting as a means of suppressing trauma or facilitating cultural destruction, annihilation, or oblivion
— Trauma, dementia, the mutability and fragility of memory
— The mind and digital memory

Because of the geographic location of the conference it is envisaged that some papers will respond to contained memory in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

Conference Venue:
Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, Tongarewa
55 Cable Street
Wellington 6011, New Zealand
+64 4 381 7000
www.tepapa.govt.nz

Abstracts due: 30 April 2010