Collective Memory and Cultural Dynamics

In their work, the programme group focuses on processes of shaping collective memory after 1989 in Slovenia and other Southeast European countries. Particularly, they focus on analysing the formation and change of contemporary memorial practices and the dynamics of cultural processes decidedly marked by these practices. The development of media strategies and technologies uprooted memory management from the domain of the political, although the political has never been so tightly intertwined with the interpretation of the past as it is in postsocialist period. On the other hand, in this period the disappearing boundaries between official and unofficial, public and private, collective and individual displaced the processes of forming and using memory from spaces of authorities and institutions. These were relegated into wider social spaces and distributed among different social subjects that, through processes of authentication, persuasion and negotiation leave important traces in memorial landscape. This is why the research focus will be on the dynamics of creating and using memory, which includes various actors, different discourses and numerous audiences. Likewise, we will investigate reinterpretations and appropriations of set authority discourses and concepts, particularly in cultural heritage, and also the ways how groups and individuals emphasise and shape, beyond national/dominant practices, their visions of heritage as worthy of memory and the usefulness of the past. Doing this we depart from understanding the dimensions of shaping collective memory cannot be understood without taking into account the entire cultural dynamic and ways subjectivity is set up and politically positioned against narratives of the past.