Emily Coussons
DARE Project: Remembering and Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Dialogues
Program(s) of Study: Gender & Women's Studies
Project Supervisor: Alison Crosby
I hope that the project's accessible nature — the website, interactive digital archive, timeline and map visualizations, and forthcoming edited volume — and interdisciplinary collaboration will foster space for important conversations surrounding feminist memory studies and the emerging field of transnational feminist memorialization. I also hope the project allows for more connections to be made between personal and activist aspects of memory work. This is what impacted me the most when interacting with the project, research team, and edited volume contributors.
Project Description:
Housed at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, Remembering and Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Dialogues brings together feminist scholars, artists, activists and community practitioners from a wide range of contexts and disciplinary perspectives to explore the transnational dimensions of how we collectively remember and memorialize colonial, militarized and state violence. We ask: Who and what gets remembered or forgotten? Whose loss mourned and grieved? What kinds of memorialization processes are assigned cultural value and how are others made absent? How are these processes shaped by racially gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities and imaginaries? How do those initiatives formulate within and move through complex transnational flows and circuits? We invoke a broad, critical and intersectional understanding of the transnational that attends to the particularities and specificities of place-based struggles and different experiences as the grounds from which to explore connections, similarities and coalitional possibilities within, across and through borders. As such, we engage the varied dimensions of the transnational, from state power to community mobilizations of grief and mourning through time, space and place, highlighting the intersectional dimensions of Indigeneity, racialization, gender, sexuality and class that shape and inform memorialization practices. Contesting the white, Eurocentric memory studies canon, Black, Indigenous, critical race and queer scholars, activists and artists are making groundbreaking interventions into how we think about memory differently. This project seeks to engage such contributions and put them in conversation with other critical intersectional and decolonial approaches to memorialization that have emerged from the various contexts in which project participants are situated.The Dean’s Award for Research Excellence (DARE) – Undergraduate enables our students to meaningfully engage in research projects supervised by LA&PS faculty members. Find out more about DARE.