MEST2FC_Memory Studies_Sociological Approaches to Memory

Social memory is a powerful tool for shaping national identities, for building antagonisms between actors as well as for strengthening reconciliation after conflict. This course offers tools for critically understanding how social memory is constructed, transmitted or silenced. It uses a sociological perspective to study the main debates, fundamental concepts and theories on social remembering, such as theories of social trauma; narratives of social memory and the social construction of silence, denial and forgetting. The aim of this course is to study how narratives of social memory are constructed. There is a distinctive characteristic in the sociological approach to the study of memory, which is framed in a specific type of theories, methods and research questions. This approach will be studied in the first part of this course. The second part of the course will delve into some of the main theories of social remembering. Finally, the third part of the course will present concrete historical examples that will be used to highlight some of the theories and concepts studied in this course.