[Commlist] CFP: Decolonization Strategies and Memory Work in Popular Culture conference

Call for Abstracts for the Decolonization Strategies and Memory Work in 
Popular Culture conference (https://mempop.eu/final-conference-2026/ 
<https://mempop.eu/final-conference-2026/>) has been extended till 
**November 10**. The conference will be held at the Faculty of Social 
Sciences, University of Ljubljana, on April 20-21, 2026.

**CFP**

Over the past several decades, the expansion, relative global 
accessibility, and accelerated hybridization of the diverse cultural and 
creative industries – from Bollywood and Nollywood to K-Pop, to Balkan 
turbofolk, and Polish video games on the one hand, to various 
transcultural and antihegemonic (feminist, queer, minoritarian) 
expressions on the other – have contributed to shifts in people’s 
experience and understanding of identities, communities, history, and 
power relations. As has been demonstrated convincingly by scholars in 
cultural studies and related disciplines (cf. for example Hall 1973; Ang 
1985; McRobbie 1994; Muňoz 1999; Huq 2006; Chen 2010; Grossberg 2010) 
popular culture informs the ways we perceive and engage with the world 
by offering narrative and aesthetic templates that shape horizons of 
possibilities and expectations. Ranging from film, TikTok videos, memes, 
fanzines, music playlists and concerts, to murals, graffiti, stickers, 
poetry and prose, and video games, diverse popular cultural forms 
facilitate cultural participation, including engagement with collective 
memory.

This conference approaches popular culture as a vibrant site of memory 
work (Kuhn 2000) – the practice of actively engaging with the past to 
understand, reinterpret, and challenge dominant narratives about it, 
with the aim of interrogating and transforming ways of feeling, being, 
and acting in the present. In the context of popular culture, memory 
work ranges from diverse readings, commentary, and creative 
re-appropriation and re-use of popular-cultural texts, to pursuing 
cultural production, distribution, and canonization models informed by 
insights into the mechanisms and mechanics of collective remembering and 
forgetting. For example, memory work may result in shifts in people’s 
mnemonic priorities, such as a reorientation from events to slow 
transformations, from victims and perpetrators to implicated subjects, 
and from monuments to ephemera and communities. It may also facilitate 
the articulation of unity in contexts that are habitually described as 
diverse, hybrid or transnational (cf. Bhaba 2000; Ebanda de B’béri 2009; 
Mwambari 2021).

Recent research on memory work as a method and device in cultural 
production (cf. Jarvis 2021; Mironescu 2024; Bukowiecki 2020; 
Cuder-Domínguez 2023) has yielded potent insights into decolonial 
practices – efforts to rethink knowledge production, representation, and 
institutional structures to challenge and dismantle colonial legacies by 
foregrounding marginalized (e.g., non-Western, economically and 
politically (semi-)peripheral, queer, feminist) perspectives advocating 
for epistemic diversity, community collaboration, and non-extractivist 
methodologies in scholarship, teaching, and public engagement (cf. Puar 
2007; Blaser 2009; Arondekar 2009; Rosario Acosta López 2021; Hui 2023; 
Risam 2018). For example, Michael Rothberg (2009) has influentially 
proposed the concept of multidirectional memory, showing how memories of 
different historical traumas, such as colonialism and the Holocaust, can 
intersect, rather than compete, fostering solidarity.

This conference advances the conversation about the decolonial and 
mnemonic impact of cultural production as a site that facilitates 
dealing with the past, reclaiming identity, and resisting oppressive 
systems by engaging with contemporary popular culture. As a site of 
increasingly networked and decentralized meaning and feeling 
contestation, negotiation, and transformation, contemporary popular 
culture is significant to the unfinished project of epistemic 
decolonization. By epistemic decolonization, we refer to the 
articulation of the diversity of cultural practices, forms, processes, 
and regimes of production, circulation, and consumption that disrupt 
colonial imperatives, such as Western claims to the universality of 
knowledge. Additionally, epistemic decolonization refers to the 
examination of the complex entanglements of cultural production with the 
(neo)colonial economic, political, epistemological, and cultural 
paradigms that contribute to the proliferation of injustice, inequality, 
and violence. In the context of the current geopolitical struggles 
between the US and China, Europe and Russia, as well as the wars in Gaza 
and Ukraine (cf. Gržinić 2024; Latysh 2024; Tlostanova 2025), advancing 
the project of epistemic decolonization is of vital importance to 
reclaiming hope and radically re-imagining futures.

We invite presentation and panel proposals that address the relationship 
between decolonization, decolonial practices, memory work, and popular 
culture (e.g., film, popular music, murals and graffiti, (video) games, 
memes, YouTube, TikTok, etc., and related communities of practice and of 
affect, networks, and spaces) in the 21st century, focusing on (but not 
limited to) the following topics:

     - Production, circulation, and reception of popular-cultural 
memories from/about Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, South America the 
Middle East, and           diasporic communities;

     - Popular-cultural (re)mediation of marginalized and/or peripheral 
memories as a strategy of resistance and identity formation;

     - Memory politics in (semi-)peripheral popular cultures: 
remembering celebrities, genres, aesthetics in the context of crises and 
transitions;

     - Decolonial memory work in popular culture across geopolitical 
contexts;

     - Responsibility, accountability, implication, and solidarity in 
popular-cultural memory;

     - Memories of hope, joy, and the future in (semi-)peripheral 
popular cultures;

     - Slow memory in popular culture: remembering gradual 
technological, cultural, and environmental transformations;

     - Spaces and infrastructures of decolonial practices and memory 
work in popular culture: film and music festivals, street art districts, 
online   communities;

     - Feminist, queer, and minoritarian popular-cultural production 
and memory work;

     - Reappropriations and creative re-uses of communism and socialism 
in digital cultures (TikTok, YouTube, video games);

     - Street art, murals, and other grassroots visual cultures as 
tools of decolonial and memory work;

     - Relationship between vernacular memory and popular-cultural 
media, forms, and flows;

     - Multimodal (verbal, visual, material, aural, gestural) aspects, 
intermedial, and transmedial aspects of multidirectional memory;

     - Epistemological and methodological challenges in researching 
cultural production and memory on the (semi-)periphery;

Responses to the methodological challenges that arise from combining 
analogue/digital data, cross-border media analysis, and working across 
disciplines.

**Submission instructions**

Please submit 300-word abstracts (including the title of the 
presentation, the main text, and a list of sources) and 100-word bios to 
(info /at/ mempop.eu) <mailto:(info /at/ mempop.eu)>.

Panel proposals should consist of a brief (150-word) panel description, 
3-4 300-word presentation proposals, and the presenters’ bios. Should a 
panel proposal not indicate a moderator, one will be assigned by the 
organizers.

The conference will be held in English. Notifications regarding accepted 
contributions will be circulated in November 2025. This is an on-site 
only event. There is no registration fee for this event, but the 
participants need to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses.


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