This panel explores the intersections between social identities and collective memories in the context of genocidal processes, drawing on perspectives from neuroscience, psychoanalysis, sociology, and genocide studies. While both memory and identity have been extensively studied, there is still no consensus regarding their definitions, boundaries, or explanatory scope.
The panel proposes an interdisciplinary dialogue to address this gap. It examines how genocidal social practices disrupt the symbolic, affective, and biological bases of social life, and how communities attempt to reconstruct coherence and continuity in the aftermath of systemic violence.
Rodrigo J. De Marco offers a biological analogy for understanding collective memory and identity, drawing parallels between the “binding problem” in neuroscience and the reconstruction of social coherence after trauma; exploriong how dispersed experiences, testimonies, and emotions are integrated, or fail to integrate, into coherent social narratives, using the work of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo as an example of collective “binding” mechanisms.
Iván Fina focuses on child appropriations during Argentina’s last dictatorship, analyzing how these practices targeted filiation, transmission, and identity as core dimensions of social existence. His study reveals how the regime’s genocidal logic sought to destroy the symbolic foundations of community, and how restitution efforts represent both ethical and identity-reconstructive acts.
Malena Silveyra examines the triad of knowledge–memory–transmission as a central target of genocidal social practices. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s sociology of development, she argues that genocide disrupts the intergenerational processes that sustain communal knowledge and identity formation.
Daniel Feierstein addresses the reorganization of collective identities through terror, analyzing how societies develop biological, psychological, and social tools to confront and deal with the experience of collective terror. His contribution situates these dynamics within the Argentine experience, exploring both advances and limitations in the collective working through of a genocidal experience.
Daniel Feierstein, CONICET/ Center of Genocide Studies-National University of Tres de Febrero/University of Buenos Aires – Former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (2013-2015) - "Genocidal Social Practices as the Reorganization of Collective Identities through Terror: The Challenges of Working Through" In previous work, such as “Memories and Representations of Terror: Working through Genocide,” I sought to bring together different disciplinary approaches to memory and identity in order to examine the role of terror in transforming social relations. That research explored how these transformations affect both individual and collective identities, as well as the role collective memories play in these processes. The present paper aims to address the challenges posed by collective processes of working through terror from a transdisciplinary perspective. It examines the biological, psychological, and social foundations that may help explain how societies confront the consequences of state-sponsored mass terror in genocidal contexts. Furthermore, it considers how these processes are reflected in the Argentine case, particularly in the public and academic debates surrounding memory and representation of the last military dictatorship. The presentation traces different stages in this ongoing process, identifying both advances and setbacks in collective efforts to engage with the enduring impact of terror on social memory and the reconfiguration of collective identities. By analyzing these dynamics, the paper seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of how terror reorganizes social bonds and identities, and how societies can develop tools to work through and resist the legacies of genocidal violence.
Ivan Fina, Center for Genocide Studies/National University of Tres de Febrero/Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo - "Filiation, Transmission and Identity as objects of Genocidal Practice: The Case of Child Appropiations during Argentina’s Last Dictatorship"
The study of child appropriations during Argentina’s last dictatorship reveals that, more than a crime committed upon bodies, they constituted a necessary component of the genocidal practice aimed at undermining the symbolic foundations of social life. By abducting the children of the disappeared and fraudulently registering them, the regime sought to disrupt the dimensions of filiation, transmission, and identity— structural elements of communal existence.
Filiation, as the institution that establishes the bond between generations and situates the subject within the social and legal order, was subverted through falsified birth certificates, illegal adoptions, and fabricated narratives designed to sustain concealment. The outcome was a pact of silence that expelled the child from their authentic history and inscribed them in a bond founded on disavowal.
Transmission, understood as the means by which a society ensures its continuity, was also targeted. Appropriation not only interrupted family inheritance but, more profoundly, the possibility of passing on values, projects, and ways of inhabiting the world. The genocidal strategy operated both by disseminating terror and by suppressing, through silence, what had preceded horror.
Finally, identity emerges as the symbolic core affected by these practices. While genetic analyses and judicial rectifications—the main instruments for identifying and restituting appropriated children—can reestablish filiatory data, identity is constituted as an ongoing process in which the subject recognizes themselves in the narratives they build about their own life. Restitution, therefore, does not return a lost identity but enables its reconfiguration through new symbolic coordinates. This possibility, in itself, represents an authentic ethical commitment undertaken by the subject.
Malena Silveyra, Center of Genocide Studies/ National University of Tres de Febrero/University of Buenos Aires, Institute of Latin American and Caribbean Studies - "The Triad of Knowledge–Memory–Transmission: The Main Target of Genocidal Social Practices"
Analyses of the relationship between genocide and memory have often focused on how societies construct remembrance around crimes, victims, and perpetrators, or on the causal factors underlying genocidal violence. This paper proposes a complementary perspective, suggesting that collective memory itself—understood as the living continuity of community knowledge—is one of the main targets of genocidal social practices.
Drawing on Norbert Elias’s sociology of development, I conceptualize civilization, in any of its communal forms, as the outcome of a long historical process of accumulation, organization, and transmission of social knowledge. This process, transmitted across generations, is expressed in the ways communities think, act, and coexist in the world. Within this framework, the triad of knowledge–memory–transmission constitutes a foundational structure for the construction of individual and collective identities.
Genocidal social practices, therefore, can be understood as systematic attempts to disrupt this triad. Beyond they destrucción of human lives, genocide attacks they social mechanisms that enable a community to remember, learn and transmit it's collective experience. On a synchronic level, it disrupts relationships of parity that are essential for making sense of the social world—and of the destruction endured. On a diachronic level, it breaks the processes of symbolization across generations, leading to an alienation from the community’s own history.
This approach emphasizes that the ultimate aim of genocide is not physical annihilation but the reorganization of social life through the destruction of shared memory and the interruption of knowledge transmission. Understanding genocide as a disruption of this civilizational triad invites interdisciplinary dialogue and deepens our comprehension of the long-term effects of genocidal violence on social cohesion and identity formation.
20260729T140020260729T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires2.4. The Connections between Social Identities and Collective Memories in the Context of GenocideSV106MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
Commemorating the Past, Acting in the Present. An Intercultural Peace-Building Education Approach in Remembering the Holocaust
Individual paperMemory Theory and Methodology02:00 PM - 03:30 PM (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/29 17:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/29 18:30:00 UTC
After World War II, the imperialist Japanese government had to come to terms with the forced establishment of an American-style democratic state based on a pacifist constitution. The national social tissue was fragmented: the American occupation had imposed forced coexistence with the enemy, now a foreigner in the Japanese country. War veterans, once considered national heroes, were given a tacit welcome, on pain of being accused of having participated in war crimes. The hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings) were marginalised because of prejudices linked to radioactive contamination. In reconsidering its atomic experience, Hiroshima, followed by Nagasaki, chose to present itself to the world as a city of peace, institutionalising a series of political, civic, and educational practices (heiwa kyōiku) aimed at empowering individuals and communities to construct universal peace. The study presents the results of an international and intercultural research project involving the Netherlands, Italy, and Japan in 2024-25, to rethink the pedagogy of memory in relation to the Holocaust. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach—memory studies, pedagogy of memory, peace-building education, heiwa kyōiku—the research will first present the results of a comparative analysis of the theoretical and critical methodologies of memory pedagogy in Europe and Japan, supporting those strategies that develop, especially in the younger generations, active participation in the commemoration of the Holocaust, critical thinking, and peace building-related agency. Subsequently, the investigation will present a practical case study, the formulation of a pilot project aimed at high schools in the Bologna area (Italy) in preparation for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The project aims to advance the ambitious goal of finalising international guidelines in the field of intercultural peace-building education that overcome linguistic and geo-cultural barriers, thereby proposing commemorative practices in remembering the Holocaust that are proactive in constructing a future of global peace.
