This lecture will be available to the public online on Thursday, 12 November, from 09:00 to 09:45. A streaming link will be shared on this page (no registration required).
*If you have already registered for the academic conference, you are also registered for the public part of the conference. For participants attending the academic part of the conference, the lecture will be held in person.
Memory under pressure: mnemonic sovereignty and limits of securitization of the past
Key note with Yuliya Yurchuk
Thursday 12 november 09:00 – 09:45
This talk invites a revisit of the conceptual foundations of memory in light of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. While memory studies have traditionally concentrated on post-violence contexts, the talk will shift toward analyzing memory as it is formed, contested, and weaponized during ongoing violence. It introduces two key concepts—invasive memory and mnemonic sovereignty—to capture memory dynamics in the violent present. Invasive memory refers to the use of historical narratives, cultural heritage, and mediated representations as instruments of epistemic and material violence, undermining communities’ ways to remember. The concept of mnemonic sovereignty is proposed to conceptualize relationships among different memory actors at national and regional levels, on the one hand, and in regard to international relations, on the other hand. The talk proposes recalibrating mnemonic securitization and memory-political deterrence theories for conditions of kinetic war.
Yuliya Yurchuk is an Associate Professor in the History of Ideas at Södertörn University, Sweden. She specializes in transnational intellectual history, memory studies, religious history, and environmental humanities, focusing mainly on Ukraine and Eastern and Central Europe. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Acta 2014) and one of the editors of “Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective” (Routledge, 2022). Her articles have appeared in Memory Studies, Nationalities Papers, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, e-flux, Topos, Nordisk Østforum, Baltic Worlds, Ukraina Moderna, Dwotygodnik, ReVisions.
She also translates Swedish literature into Ukrainian and wrote the book “Sweden: a model kit” (Vihola, 2022, in Ukrainian). She is currently working on two projects: one in transnational intellectual history and another on cultural heritage in Russia’s war against Ukraine.