The 10th MSA Annual Meeting “Memory and Democracy” is taking place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of the largest countries in Latin America, located in the Global South. Since its creation in 2022, the Transformative Inclusivity Initiative has sought to make the Memory Studies Association more inclusive in terms of welcoming memories, members, regions and the more-than-human planet. While we welcome the MSA’s efforts to push the boundaries and carry the annual meeting beyond the militarized borders of ‘the West,’ we think it crucial that the MSA’s most important annual event not only parachute into another, a different and distant site, but that this location thoroughly and lastingly impact discussions, views and participants. In other words, by welcoming the MSA in Buenos Aires, we hope that Buenos Aires is also welcomed in the MSA.
The Transformative Inclusivity Initiative therefore supports this encounter and mutual exchange with a roundtable focusing not just on the continent Latin America, the country of Argentina or the city of Buenos Aires. Through this focused panel, the initiative also seeks to highlight the tensions, frictions and conflicts underlying the conditions of possibility enabling the MSA’s Annual Meeting to take place in this ‘Capital of the South’. The roundtable invites presenters and audiences to discuss, reflect and dissect the ways in which the Memory Studies Association may have to become more inclusive in order to welcome Latin American forms and contents of memory. In this framework, we want to ask how this annual meeting itself may be a site of simultaneous forgetting and remembering. What are regional forms and contents of remembrance that have not been recognized enough thus far? How can the MSA better negotiate a temporary event structure with the ongoing, fragmented and tenuous emergence of memories on site?
20260729T110020260729T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires1.5. Transformative Inclusivity Initiative: The MSA in Latin America and Latin America in the MSASV204MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
