Memory studies address the interplay between the past and the present within multilayered contextual perspectives. We believe that collective memory is an arena of struggle. Radically commonizing memory enables us to draw connections between seemingly unrelated historical events. After all, a transformative struggle can only emerge from collectively reconstructing and reclaiming memory.

We focus on registering the continuities and discontinuities of the existing narratives and contributing to the development of alternatives; ones that register and reveal the experience and memory of social segments that are not in power. Ultimately, it is an empowerment project that operates through the re-definition of the past, present and thereby fuels the imagination of a future based on the actual accounts of the commons.

How do we create a collective memory that opens new paths to the unspoken or ideologically censored areas of history? We believe that oral history with its intuitive radical roots gives us a chance to base a foundation of a commonized memory – a perspective of underrepresented and unspoken. It allows us to deconstruct history as an ideological tool of the State and nourishes a new era of collectively democratized record of our recent history.

Working Group Leader: Eylem Delikanlı