Past event
Professor Nina Parish 'Diasporic memory practice on the Internet: Remembering lost homelands' CIMS Seminar Series
The Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute welcomes Professor Nina Parish from the University of Stirling's Division of Literature & Languages as part of its Seminar Series.
The event will be held in hybrid format in UCO 30 and online (see join link above).
‘Diasporic memory practice on the Internet: Remembering lost homelands'.
This paper will present some collaborative research emerging from the Disputed Territories and Memory project (www.disterrmem.eu), which brings together academic and civil society partners from the UK, Poland, Armenia and Pakistan. It will examine the work of two diasporic memory organisations, Kresy-Siberia and Houshamadyan, which have both developed Internet platforms to collect and share information about lost homelands: in the former case, the pre-World War II eastern borderlands of Poland; in the latter, the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire that were destroyed by genocide. The paper asks what difference the creation of an online platform makes to such groups, both for individuals and for the wider diaspora, and seeks to understand how the possibilities offered by these platforms shape diasporic practice. It will endeavour to show how, despite the apparent similarities between the online presences of these two organizations, their use of the Internet facilitates diverse forms of memory practice, which are influenced by the historically specific needs of participants in these different diasporic communities.
This event is free and open to students and staff from any discipline.