2.21. Activism, social movements, counterhegemonic memories I [ES/EN]

SummerLab is an interdisciplinary initiative that brings together artists, victims, former combatants, students, and scholars to co-create experimental practices of memory in Colombia's post-conflict setting. Conceived as both a laboratory and a collective encounter, it provides a unique space where participants can share experiences, confront silences, and craft new forms of remembrance that extend beyond official state narratives. This presentation reflects on how SummerLab fosters dialogue across deep social and political divides, offering a forum in which art and testimony intersect. Through performance, visual arts, music, and collaborative workshops, participants engage in processes that materialize memory while challenging rigid categories such as "victim" and "perpetrator." These practices highlight the complexities of identity in contexts of armed conflict and demonstrate that memory is not a fixed archive but an ongoing, relational process. SummerLab's methodology emphasizes participation, creativity, and inclusivity. By creating a setting where voices that are often marginalized—peasants, women, Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities—can engage alongside institutional actors and academics, it produces a more plural vision of the conflict's legacies. In doing so, it not only documents the past but also generates new imaginaries for coexistence, reconciliation, and democratic resilience. The project also reveals how artistic and collective practices can serve as counterpoints to official transitional justice mechanisms, complementing truth commissions and archives with embodied and affective forms of knowledge. These creative practices strengthen collective agency, resist oversimplified narratives, and nurture solidarity across fractured communities. Ultimately, this presentation argues that initiatives such as SummerLab exemplify how participatory memory-making can transform the work of transitional justice. By weaving together art, scholarship, and lived experience, they contribute to building democratic cultures that are more inclusive, resilient, and capable of embracing Colombia's diverse and contested histories.

The legacy of 1998–1999 war in Kosovo remains deeply contested, with memory politics continuing to shape peacebuilding and transitional justice processes. While state actors have dominated official memorialization processes, civil society organizations (CSOs) have emerged as important, but often under recognized actors seeking to preserve, contest, and diversify narratives of the past. This paper examines how CSOs in Kosovo have engaged in practices of memorialization, by both complementing and directly challenging state led memory initiatives. Focusing on qualitative research, this paper explores how CSOs navigate a memory landscape marked by antagonistic state narratives. It examines the efforts by CSOs to create more inclusive practices that amplify marginalized voices, whose experiences of war related trauma have often been silenced in the predominantly militarized meta narrative. The paper makes three contributions. First, it highlights the concrete initiatives through which CSOs document war legacies, such as oral histories, exhibitions, and grassroots commemorations, which serve as counter narratives to the mono ethnic state led memorialization practices. Second, it analyzes the tensions between “bottom up” memory practices and “top down” state or donor driven frameworks, presenting arguments as to why the efforts to make processes inclusive and legitimate, particularly among minority communities, have failed. Third, the paper situates these dynamics within wider debates on transitional justice, arguing that CSOs not only contribute towards memory preservation, but also act as mediators in cases of contested narratives, opening possibilities for a more pluralistic or agonistic culture of remembrance. Emphasizing the role of CSOs in Kosovo’s memory landscape underscores the duality in their position as both challengers and collaborators in the politics of remembrance. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on post conflict memory and transitional justice by showing how grassroots actors can oppose hegemonic narratives while also facing significant structural and political barriers.

This presentation aims to analyze the stories and narratives of İzmir-based "counter-memory" works regarding the Great Fire of Smyrna/İzmir in the two decades leading to its centennial: the centennial of the catastrophic destruction of its multicultural population with the fire devastating the city immediately after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. Following the fire's near absence in official historiography and its silencing in social memory within the context of Turkey's nation-building process, I argue that these recent counter-memory works constitute a collective effort to challenge the multiple layers of silencing. While doing so, these memorializations contribute to a common ground for coming to terms with the city's violent past and seeking the potential of a collective mourning for the unmounted loss of Smyrna in today's İzmir. As of early 2025, such common ground brings in even further transformative potential with the ongoing “peace process” between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Turkish state following a 40-year-long war. As the activists, artists, and locals make use of the "surviving ruins" within the former "fire zone" (the former Greek, Armenian, and Levantine quarters of the city where pre-1922 traces are largely gone) and seek surviving stories as reference points for their counter memory works, I analyze their interactions with these survivors and with each other. My field study consists of my engagement and/or in-depth interviews with the actors of 19 different "counter-memory" works in the form of unofficial public commemorations, memory walks, counter-monuments, counter-archives, exhibitions, and various artworks remembering the Great Fire and the city preceding it, unprecedented in İzmir's memoryscape dominated by the politics of forgetting. I also discuss how these works engage with the memorialization of the Great Fire in Greece, seeking collective mourning that transcends national borders.

This paper explores the evolving relationship between state-driven memory policies and grassroots activism in shaping the cultural identity of Turks of African origin (Afro-Turks). Drawing on historical, postcolonial, and memory studies perspectives, it examines how state institutions and elite narratives of modernization, secularism, and national unity have framed Afro-Turk identity from the proclamation of the Republic in 1923 to the present. The study reveals how official policies of remembrance have marginalized non-dominant racial and ethnic groups, while new forms of Afro-Turk activism seek to challenge this exclusion through cultural memory work. Methodologically, the paper combines Jan and Aleida Assmann’s distinction between cultural and communicative memory with Jeffrey Olick’s concept of the politics of regret. This framework enables an analysis of how the Turkish state institutionalized selective remembrance—transforming Afro-Turks into a “forgotten” community—while Afro-Turk activists and associations cultivate living, communicative memories that reclaim visibility, continuity, and belonging. The study focuses particularly on the activities of the Africans Culture and Solidarity Society (founded in Ayvalık in 2006) as a non-state memory actor promoting intercultural dialogue and historical accountability. Through qualitative discourse and textual analysis, the paper demonstrates how Afro-Turk initiatives transform memory into a democratic practice that contests national homogenization. By confronting the silence surrounding slavery, servitude, and racial difference in Turkish history, Afro-Turk activism not only reclaims suppressed narratives but also contributes to the broader project of democratic pluralism and inclusive citizenship in contemporary Türkiye.