How colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence are remembered and memorialized—through, for example, memorials, museums, archives, performances, and art installations—are sites of constant contestation and anxiety. Questions of who and what gets remembered or forgotten, whose loss mourned and grieved, and how and what kinds of memorialization processes are assigned cultural value while others are made absent, are shaped by racially gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities, and imaginaries. They also emerge within and are shaped by–sometimes in resistance to–transnational relations, discourses, ideologies, market flows, border controls, migration patterns, legal frameworks, media culture, and more. This cluster invokes a broad and intersectional understanding of the transnational that attends to the particularities of place-based struggles and different experiences as the grounds from which to explore connections, similarities, and coalitional possibilities within, across, and through borders and contexts. This cluster asks what a transnational feminist lens might reveal about the space of remembrance and memorialization. Simultaneously, cluster members seek to explore what the lens of memory and memorialization may conversely illuminate about our transnational feminist engagements, scholarly, artistic, activist, and otherwise.
Through individual and collaborative projects, events, workshops, publications, and an interactive digital archive (in development), this cluster fosters critical dialogue, collaboration, and research innovation in feminist memory studies. Faculty and students in the group come from York University, but also from other institutions in Canada and internationally. They represent a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including sociology, gender and women studies, fine arts, environmental studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Asian Studies, South Asian Studies.
This research cluster has several goals:
Thinking through the relationship between memory and memorialization to explore a wide range of memory projects as they reconfigure, perform, and transform (transnational) relations of power between individuals, communities, and the state in the aftermath of violence.
Analyzing critically the process of memorialization.
Examining feminist (re)constructions of memory and the ways that memory projects can be acts of resistance and contestation to the hegemonic when they seek to excavate and make known knowledge, experiences, and forms of agency that have been suppressed. We seek to understand how memorialization contributes to reshaping and reimagining our understandings of history and subjectivity by bringing to the fore what the past means to those who have experienced its oppression.
Facilitating collaboration with scholars nationally and internationally.
Memorializing Violence brings together feminist and queer reflections on the transnational lives of memorialization practices, asking what it means to grapple with loss, mourning, grief, and desires to collectively remember and commemorate–as well as urges to forget–in the face of disparate yet entangled experiences of racialized and gendered colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. The volume uses a transnational feminist approach to ask, How do such efforts in seemingly unconnected remembrance landscapes speak to, with, and through each other in a world order inflected by colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics, structures, and strictures? How do these memorializing initiatives not only formulate within but move through complex transnational flows and circuits, and what transpires as they do? What does it mean to inhabit loss, mourning, resistance, and refusal through memorialization at this moment, and what’s at stake in doing so? What might transnational feminist analyses of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation have to offer in this regard?
Featuring work by Carmela Murdocca, Amber Dean, Karine Duhamel, Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj, María de los Ángeles Aguilar, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Shahrzad Mojab, Chowra Makaremi, Ayu Ratih, Honor Ford-Smith, Juanita Stephen, Erica S. Lawson, Ola Osman, Alma Cordelia Rizzo Reyes, Charlotte Henay, Camille Turner & Mila Mendez
Alison Crosby is an associate professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University and the former director of the Centre for Feminist Research (2014–2019). Her research uses a transnational feminist lens and participatory methodologies to accompany protagonists’ multifaceted struggles to redress and memorialize colonial racialized gendered violence in Guatemala, where she has worked for over thirty years. She is the co-editor (with Heather Evans) of Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections (Rutgers University Press, 2025). She is the co-author (with M. Brinton Lykes) of Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), which received the 2021 Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. The book was published in Guatemala as Más Allá de la Reparación: Protagonismo de Mujeres Mayas en las Secuelas del Daño Genocida (Cholsamaj, 2019).
Malathi de Alwis (1963–2021) was a renowned Sri Lankan cultural anthropologist, feminist, and environmental activist. She published widely on social movements associated with “disappearances” as well as on nationalism, militarism, displacement, suffering, and memorialisation. Her publication, Archive of Memory, curated and edited with Hasini Haputhanthri and simultaneously published in English, Sinhala, and Tamil, offers a people’s object-related history of the past seventy years of independence in Sri Lanka. A section of this work toured the island as part of the It’s About Time traveling history museum. De Alwis led “memory walks” around Colombo and collaborated on a “memory map” to document sites of violence across Sri Lanka; see http://historicaldialogue.lk/map/.
Heather Evans is a doctoral candidate in the gender, feminist, and women’s studies program at York University. They are the co-editor (with Alison Crosby) of Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Reflections (Rutgers University Press, 2025). Their research draws on transnational feminist theory, critical human trafficking studies, and memory studies to examine how militarized sexual harm and racialized, gendered resistance are constructed through the transnational memorialization practices of the “comfort women” movement. Their work is informed by thirteen years of experience as a campaigner, researcher, and educator with the “comfort women” movement in the South Korean and Canadian contexts, as well as nearly a decade of research on memorialization landscapes and critical interrogations of human trafficking and modern slavery discourses.
Honor Ford-Smith is a poet, theater worker, and scholar and an associate professor emerita at York University. Her most recent performance work is the ten-year performance cycle “Letters to the Dead” and “Vigil for Roxie,” coauthored with Carol Lawes, Eugene Williams, and others. Her publications include Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women (with Sistren), 3 Jamaican Plays: A Postcolonial Anthology 1977–1987, and My Mother’s Last Dance. As the founding artistic director of the Sistren Theatre Collective in Jamaica, an early Black and Caribbean feminist organization, she cowrote and directed Sistren’s Bellywoman Bangarang, Bandoolu Version, Domestics, Sweet Sugar Rage, and more.
Shahrzad Mojab, scholar, teacher, and activist, is internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, and violence on women’s learning and education and Marxist feminism and antiracism pedagogy. She is a professor emerita of adult education and community development and of women and gender studies at the University of Toronto. Her most recent books include Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance,Women of Kurdistan: A Historical and Bibliographical Study (coauthored with Amir Hassanpour); Youth as/in Crisis: Young People, Public Policy, and the Politics of Learning (coedited with Sara Carpenter); Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (coauthored with Sara Carpenter); Marxism and Feminism; Educating from Marx: Race, Gender and Learning (coedited with Sara Carpenter), and Women, War, Violence, and Learning.
Carmela Murdocca is the York Research Chair in Reparative and Racial Justice and a professor in the Department of Sociology at York University. She is appointed to graduate programs in sociology, sociolegal studies, and social and political thought. Her research is concerned with the intersections of racial carceral violence and the social and legal politics of repair, redress, and reparations.
Susan Benson-Sokmen is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Feminist Research. Supported by a SSHRC-CGS doctoral fellowship, she earned her PhD in history from the University of Toronto in 2019. Her doctoral research focused on Kurdish resistance in Turkey, its remembrance, and the remembrance of revolutionary pasts as a form of resistance in and for present struggles for freedom and liberation in and beyond the Middle East. Based on her doctoral research, her first monograph—Poetry of the Past: Resistance and Remembrance in Kurdistan—will be published by Peter Lang Publishing in 2025.
Her postdoctoral project, “Revolutionary Pasts, the Authoritarian Present & Emancipatory Futures: Kurdish Women and Memorial Resistance in the Middle East,” employs a variety of artistic and counter-archival sources in a historical investigation of the revolutionary culture that nurtures the resistance and remembrance of female fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK). As “women of a non-state nation”—the world’s approximately 30 million Kurds living within and over the borders of “ethnic” nation-states that have repeatedly attempted to assimilate them—Kurdish women have a long history of resistance. And yet, despite the participation of Kurdish women in armed struggle since the 1920s, their revolutionary pasts have been discounted by feminist scholars and overlooked by historians of the left. Her postdoctoral project enlists an alternate temporality to reclaim the feminist possibilities of a revolutionary past “experienced in remembrance.”
She is the author of “Revolutionary Pasts and the Authoritarian Present: Women, Memory, and Resistance in Kurdistan” (in Kurdish Women Through History, Culture, and Resistance, ed. Shahrzad Mojab) and “Fighting Side by Side with their Men: The Mount Ararat Uprising and the Feminist Erasures of (Some) Histories of Women’s Resistance” (in The Political and Cultural History of the Kurds, ed. Amir Harrak).
