As a collection of scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds interested in how conceptions of the “global” shape—and are shaped by—memory formations from around the world, our group will host a range of presentations that highlight the breadth and generative potential of global memories in transit. For instance, how are memories globalized in relation to migration, refugee crises, conspiracy theories, or South-South solidarities? What can we learn with regard to (de)colonization, neo-imperialism, and transnational social justice movements from investigating these processes? The global memories working group panels will focus on the productive tensions highlighted by examining these global memories in panels that focus on decolonization, the far right and memory media.

The routes taken by memories and memory cultures as they circulate physically, affectively, and conceptually harbor enormous potential for teaching us about the systems of connectivity that have shaped social life in the past and continue to do so. We believe that it is of paramount importance to analyze current and emerging forms of globality in a time when the connective tissue between us appears to be both a more dominant, and a more subtle, force than it has perhaps ever been. Global memories are not just ones which come from a wide array of geographical or transnational contexts, but also those that invite us to rethink our orthodox understanding of the “global” itself. If a wealth of scholarship in recent decades has focused on the ways in which processes of travel and transit open windows into the complexities of modernity, we ask what this means for us today in world cultures shaped by forces as distinct as physical displacement, conspicuous consumption of travel, and algorithmically-generated pathways of information flow. How does such a complex shape not only the way we think about memory and the global, but the methods we rely on to produce knowledge about them?