[ecrea] CfP: Memories of the Future

*/Memories of the Future/*

*_International conference_**. Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, 
Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, 
University of London*

*_Dates_**: 29-30 March 2019*

*_Confirmed speakers_**: Stephen Bann (Bristol); Rebecca Coleman 
(Goldsmiths); Paolo Jedlowski (Calabria); Anna Reading (KCL); Michael 
Rothberg (UCLA)*

*Proposals for panels or papers by _31 July 2018_ to 
**(memories.future /at/ sas.ac.uk)* <mailto:(memories.future /at/ sas.ac.uk)>*.*

*Call for papers*

What does it mean to remember the future? What roles do memory, history, 
the past play in our consciousness as citizens of the early twenty-first 
century?

David Lowenthal (2015) reminds us that 'commands to forget coexist with 
zeal to commemorate', which raises the very important yet often 
overlooked questions of: what to remember and what to forget, who is 
well positioned to lead on or judge in that process, with whose legacies 
in mind, and with what consequences for future and past generations. In 
the 1980s, a significant body of scholarship on cultural memory emerged 
to protect the past from ‘time’s corrosive energy’, leading to 
‘collective future thought’ (J. Assmann, 2011; Szpunar and Szpunar, 
2016). Cultural memory acted as a moral imperative, a prerequisite to 
overcome not merely violent pasts but the violence inherent in linear 
temporality. As such, cultural memory has been seen as redemptive, 
enabling a more productive relation between past, present and future.

More recently, ‘thinking forward through the past’ has been central to a 
number of AHRC-funded projects in the UK examining environmental change, 
postcolonial disaster, gender and colonialism, heritage futures, ruins 
and more. Climate change, big data and the crisis of democracy are 
challenging our future in ways that may suggest a misalignment of 
temporal scales. One way of responding to this is through what Reinhart 
Koselleck (2000) called horizons of expectations and spaces of 
experience, namely, the horizons implicit in our anticipations of the 
future and the degree to which our experience of these have changed and 
will change over time. Utopian imaginaries and deploying utopia as a 
method (Levitas, 2013) invite us to think about hope, empathy, and 
solidarity, each contributing to create different places from which to 
imagine a future outside crises, fears and risk.

The past and the future constitute our cultural horizons in ways which 
are neither neutral nor solely technical, but, as Appadurai (2013) has 
suggested, ‘shot through with affect and sensation’. One of the key 
challenges of our time is how to study and create futures we truly care 
for and which are more social (Adam and Groves 2007; Urry, 2016).

/Memories of the Future/ invites contributions to articulate the future 
in relation to cultural memory, and interrogate the precise and diverse 
manners in which the past, the present and the future are intertwined 
and dialogical, complicating our understanding of temporalities in an 
age saturated with memory and ‘past futures’.

Suggested themes and areas of inquiry include:

  * The future of memory
  * Temporal multi-directionalities
  * Memories of the future
  * Utopias and dystopias
  * Past, present and future mobilities
  * Smart cities and future/ist metropolises
  * Science-fiction and other subsets of utopia
  * Housing, cohousing and the future of habitation
  * Futurisms, modernisms, afro-futurisms
  * The future in/and the Anthropocene
  * Post-humanism and the non-human
  * Intentions, expectations, anticipations
  * Counterfactuals
  * Trauma, violence and conflict
  * Tangible and intangible heritage


*Please submit proposals for panels or papers (max 20 minutes) by _31 
July 2018_ to **(memories.future /at/ sas.ac.uk)* 
<mailto:(memories.future /at/ sas.ac.uk)>*, including a 150-250 words abstract.*

*(S.Arnold-de Simine (BBK) C.López Galviz (Lancaster) G.Panteli (UCL) 
K.Pizzi (IMLR) J.Siebers (Middlesex)*


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