This panel examines a range of ways in which museums serve as sites of counter-memory, and political activism as they both navigate and espouse political positions. It examines how museums and memory institutions grapple with the aftermath of violence. In examining institutions of countermemory in the US by example of the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama and the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, Ekaterina A. Olson Shipyatsky considers how museums can challenge hegemonic narratives in a productive, democratic way ad negotiate different forms of truth. Alexandra Pucciarelli’s Counter-Mapping Memory investigates community-driven cartographies of remembrance in the Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill after the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting. Counter-mapping becomes a reparative practice through which grief, resilience, and belonging are spatially re-imagined outside institutional memorial frames. Jackie Feldman and Roni Mikel-Arieli’s Shoah Immersion for a Traumatized Public? analyzes how Israel’s Ghetto Fighters' Museum revises their use of media and guiding narrations in the wake of October 7 2023, in light of the contemporary trauma and nationalism experienced by museum visitors during the Hamas/Hizbollah rocket attacks and the war in Gaza. Anna Calise focuses on the UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, a global platform launched in 2025 that assembles digitized reconstructions of looted items and traces their trajectories to raise awareness and support restitution processes. The museum reframes absence as a democratic form of memory-making and translates institutional responsibility into a participatory environment where states, museums, and communities share the work of accountability. She argues that that institutional platforms like UNESCO’s are crucial for scaling democratic remembrance and reimagining museums as civic technologies of accountability. These papers interrogate how institutions and communities negotiate the fragile boundaries between truth witnessing and re-traumatization, empathy and identification, preservation and transformation. In the face of renewed antisemitic and political violence, the panel asks what kinds of witnessing and what forms of museological care can sustain ethical remembrance in the present.
Ekaterina A. Olson Shipyatsky, University of Michigan - “Space, Responsibility, and the Counter-institution: Narrating Enslavement and its Afterlives in Charleston, South Carolina and Montgomery, Alabama” White supremacist museums and memorials have long dominated the memoryscape of the Southeastern United States. Celebratory memorials to confederate generals and nostalgic plantation museums are seemingly everywhere one turns. In the last decade, however, new museums and memorials - which I term “memory institutions” - have emerged in the South. These memory institutions are re-centering the violence of enslavement and its afterlives in the story of both the South and the United States itself. This paper examines the ways two such institutions - the Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama and the International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina - are responding to centuries of white supremacist memory-craft through interventions into the built environment of the United States. These new memory institutions mobilize encounters with mourning, space, theories of political economy, and theories of the international to create and disseminate repertoires for understanding the past. Through analysis of the Legacy Sites and the IAAM, I make the case for political theorists and memory scholars alike to take memory institutions seriously as key sites of political production. I show that, in constructing spatial experiences, museums and memorials equip the people who visit them with frameworks through which to understand the past and its bearing on the present and future. And in doing so, I argue, they produce theories of responsibility, temporalities, and even new material realities.
Alexandra Pucciarelli (Rutgers University) Counter-Mapping Memory My presentation Counter-Mapping Memory discusses how mapping practices can reveal, contest, and reimagine the spatial dimensions of collective memory. I investigate how communities create and inhabit their own cartographies of remembrance outside traditional institutional frames. Counter-mapping has historically been used to study state power, but through this project joy, grief, and resilience are mapped over the narratives placed on Squirrel Hill's Jewish Community in the aftermath of the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue. It is not defined by the shooting, which was the largest antisemitic terrorist attack in US history, resulting in the murder of eleven worshippers. Violence causes a rupture that disrupts the narratives of a community. However, it does not obliterate their history. The community's present and future narratives were changed by the shooting, but it does not define them. Drawing from my dissertation research, Counter-Mapping Memory: Intergenerational Trauma, Material Culture, and Jewish Identity at the Tree of Life Memorial, the project examines how participants use counter-mapping to trace emotional, sensory, and historical geographies that go beyond official narratives. My research situates remembrance within lived space rather than fixed monumentality. Museums and memorial sites are positioned as anchors for public memory but limit what is visible or marked as valuable. Counter-mapping fights against these boundaries by making visible the informal, affective, and ephemeral ways that memory circulates through streets, homes, and bodies. The resulting maps (textual, visual, and performative) function as affective archives, holding factual or commemorative data and gestures, absences, and emotional residues. Counter-mapping complements but also complicates museological and archival practices. Counter-Mapping Memory contributes to ongoing efforts to imagine more porous, participatory, and affect-sensitive approaches to public memory.
Jackie Feldman and Roni Mikel-Arieli, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, "Shoah immersion for a traumatized public? Transmitting the Holocaust in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 at the Ghetto Fighters' Museum, Israel" ln lsrael, memories of the Holocaust inform debates over national identity and security, and serve as a basis for ethical norms. The Holocaust is commemorated in schools, museums and public gatherings throughout the country. Among the important sites is the Ghetto Fighters' Museum near the northern border. This institute includes a museum for children as well as a humanistic education program, directed at Arab and Jewish youth living in the Galilee. Over the past decade, the museum has introduced electronic and immersive media that combine darkness, sound effects and interaction with Holocaust-era objects. These media foster identification with the victim and make "past presencing" (MacDonald 2013:16) possible for a generation with little contact with living survivors. The Hamas attack of 7/10/2023 has often been described in lsrael as another Holocaust. The world reaction to the war in Gaza, as reported in Israeli media, was often seen as evidence of the eternal persistence of anti Semitism. The vulnerability of Israelis during the war often challenged the paradigm of Holocaust and Revival which shaped much of the Israeli master narrative, while the evacuation of the museum, resulting from damage by rockets made connections more immediate. How do visitors, many of them displaced from their homes by rocket attacks, victims of Hamas violence or active soldiers in the subsequent war in Gaza, react to Holocaust education in the immediate aftermath? Do certain representations and immersive technologies in the museum trigger immediate experiences of the current war? How do the museum staff and guides accommodate this? What effect has it had on humanistic education practices or presentations to children? What can this teach us about the transmission of Holocaust and genocide to participants with immediate traumatic experiences? These are some of the issues we explore through observations and interviews with museum staff and guides.
Anna Calise (University of Pavia) Re signifying Absence: Digital Restitution, Institutional Responsibility, and UNESCO’s Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects Debates on restitution and repatriation remain entangled in legal and diplomatic constraints, even as public demands for repair continue to grow. Within this context, museums, cultural institutions, and – most disruptively – artists and activists increasingly mobilize digital media not as mere substitutes for material return but as instruments of re signification: tools that redistribute visibility, narrative authority, and access for communities historically excluded from their heritage. From a media studies perspective, this paper examines how digital remediation and platform design transform the state of restitution by reconfiguring the conditions under which heritage is perceived, situated, and interpreted – across material infrastructures, sensorial interfaces, spatiotemporal reach, and semiotic frames. The focal case is the UNESCO Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, a global platform launched in 2025 that assembles digitized reconstructions of looted items and traces their trajectories to raise awareness and support restitution processes. By curating what it defines as a “shrinking collection” – one that should diminish as objects are physically returned – the museum reframes absence as a democratic form of memory making. Its design choices – immersive navigation, detailed object dossiers, and pedagogical spaces such as a “restitution room” – translate institutional responsibility into a participatory environment where states, museums, and communities share the work of accountability. While the most radical experiments in this field often emerge from artistic and activist contexts – Relooted, an Africafuturist game that stages the reclamation of real artifacts from fictional Western museums, being a notable example – this study argues that institutional platforms like UNESCO’s are equally crucial for scaling democratic remembrance and reimagining museums as civic technologies of accountability. Through close analysis of interface, data architecture, and narrative
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires5.8. Museum & Memory #1: Museums, Truth, Witnessing and the Aftermath of ViolenceSVE2MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
