Open call for papers for the sixth issue of the scientific journal History of Communism in Europe: (Dis)Embedding. The Institutionalization of the Social Memory of Totalitarian Pasts: Practices, Politics, Arts.

The topic of the forthcoming issue of the scientific journal History of Communism in Europe is (Dis)Embedding. The Institutionalization of the Social Memory of Totalitarian Pasts: Practices, Politics, Arts. 20th century Europe faced several forms of authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes, both from the extreme right and from the extreme left of the political echelon. 21st century Europe aims at building democratic societies and at learning from the struggles of the past, an endeavor that implies, on one hand, a close and honest look at history and a careful work in institutionalizing the various collective memories of the European communities, on the other. The question of how to deal with traumatic memory stirs debates to this day. This volume tries to gather some pertinent answers, models or useful inquiries regarding the management of the intricate relationship between memory practices, their institutionalization and the (un)welcomed mixture of politics in this already complex equation. How do we conceptualize, interpret, re-present and institutionalize an accurate version of the past, if there is one? How do we include all the voices that need to make themselves heard? Do we need to limit the intrusion of the political factor? What is the role of the civil society in managing the past? We welcome contributions from different fields of research: history, cultural studies, museum studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, gender studies or any other related areas of interest, written from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Topics may address the following aspects:

- from concept to representation;
- time-space relationship in representing the past;
- technology and its impact on museums, exhibitions and installations;
- official/public initiative on memorialization vs. private initiative;
- learning and visitors studies: education programs and techniques;
- cultural management of the social memory of a totalitarian past;
- the relation between arts (literature, visual art, performing art) and politics;
- state organized forgetting: representing the past in communist regimes;
- formal memorialization versus non-formal memory display or enactment: exhibitions, collections, installations, street art, flash mobs.


Contributors are kindly asked to write abstracts that do not exceed 500 words. Deadline: 30th of March 2015.

You may submit your proposals at: hce@iiccr.ro , dalia.bathory@gmail.com.

Selected authors will be notified by the 15th of April 2015. The deadline for the final draft of the paper is the 10th of August 2015.
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The academic journal History of Communism in Europe is edited by The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. It is a journal open to all inquiries that have the objectivity, complexity and sophistication required by any research on the issue of communism, as well as on the different aspects of totalitarianisms of the 20th Century Europe. These scholarly investigations must remain an interdisciplinary enterprise, in which raw data and refined concepts help us understand the subtle dynamics of any given phenomenon.