Apply now! The MSA’s Call for Papers for the 2025 Annual Conference

The Memory Studies Association invites proposals for its ninth annual conference, to be held from 14 to 18 July 2025 at Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in the historic city of Prague. This on-site conference aims to carry over from earlier conferences a transdisciplinary conversation on memory and its social, cultural and public relevance. It welcomes scholars, practitioners, and activists from diverse fields to contribute to this vibrant exchange of ideas.

In 2025, we will globally commemorate many significant anniversaries, such as the end of World War II (1945) and the end of the Vietnam War (1975). We will mourn the victims of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia (1995) and the massacres in Sudan (2005). Additionally, we will be half a decade removed from the onset of the COVID-19 lockdowns. With the theme Beyond Crises: Resilience and (In)stability, the conference seeks to explore how the memory of these events and other critical turning points has led to new tensions but also generated new possibilities. What patterns of decisive change can we observe? What is the role of memory in these processes, and how have they been commemorated? How have such critical turning points and their actors been collectively remembered and commemorated? And what can memory teach us amid the ongoing polycrisis?

Organized in the shadow of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the rise of populist and authoritarian tendencies all over the world, imminent climate collapse and humanitarian crises including ones in public health, Beyond Crises invites a multifaceted discussion on what memory scholars can learn from the memory of earlier crises and how that knowledge might be used to deal with ongoing political and social standoffs. Looking at shared and divided memoryscapes and the voices of marginalized communities, the conference will make a major contribution to the understanding of how societies remember and learn from crises.

The conference seeks to study, across different cultures and regions, the complex dynamics between remembering and forgetting, and between inclusion and exclusion, that take place in the aftermath of crisis.  We will address instances where such memory constellations have led to dead-ends or backlashes; but also cases where they feed into an ongoing quest for justice, peace, and societal well-being. By focusing on themes such as hope, resilience, and reconciliation, we aim to understand how, and in which circumstances, communities and individuals can recover and rebuild after turmoil. The conference will investigate how the memory of earlier crises has inspired movements for change and social justice.