Vanessa Tautter is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton. Their PhD project explores how memory change since the 1980s in Austria (relating to memories of Nazism, World War II and the Shoah) and Northern Ireland (relating to memories of the Northern Ireland conflict) has been experienced by those socialised in ‘traditional’, previously more dominant memory cultures. It builds on oral histories to establish how these individuals compose their own and/or their family’s life stories and histories of ‘implication’ in relation to these wider cultural shifts, and how they negotiate meanings of the past between the ‘private’ and ‘public’. In this context, the project focuses on their complex emotional responses to these shifts, which they often experienced as challenges to their own subjectivity, identity and family history. By doing so, the project seeks to understand how ‘populist’ political movements attempt to capitalise on these ‘popular’ feelings. Furthermore, it aims to create space for the critical study of heterogeneous cultures of implication and perpetration, and their meaning for society until today.

Based at the Institute for European Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Sabine Volk is an Early Career Fellow at the Horizon 2020 project Delayed transformational fatigue in Central and Eastern Europe: Responding to the rise of illiberalism/populism and at the University of Helsinki’s project Now-Time, Us-Space. At the intersection of interpretive political science, social movement studies and memory studies, Sabine’s work explores the role of culture, specifically history and memory, in populist far-right mobilization in post-communist eastern Germany. Among her most recent publications are Patriotic history in postcolonial Germany, thirty years after “reunification” in the Journal of Genocide Research, and ‘Contested memories of the East German Peaceful Revolution: Appeals to 1989 by the populist PEGIDA movement’ in Contested Legacies of 1989: Geopolitics, Memories and Societies in Central and Eastern Europe.