How colonial, imperial, militarized and state violence are remembered and memorialized—through, for example, memorials, museums, archives, performances, and art installations—are sites of constant contestation and anxiety. Questions of who and what gets remembered or forgotten, whose loss mourned and grieved, and how and what kinds of memorialization processes are assigned cultural value while others are made absent, are shaped by racially gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities, and imaginaries. They also emerge within and are shaped by–sometimes in resistance to–transnational relations, discourses, ideologies, market flows, border controls, migration patterns, legal frameworks, media culture, and more. Invoking a broad and intersectional understanding of the transnational that attends to the particularities of place-based struggles and different experiences as the grounds from which to explore connections, similarities, and coalitional possibilities within, across, and through borders and contexts, this project centrally asks what a transnational feminist lens might reveal about the space of remembrance and memorialization. Simultaneously, it seeks to explore what the lens of memory and memorialization may conversely illuminate about our transnational feminist engagements, scholarly, artistic, activist, and otherwise.

This project was born out of The Inhabitance of Loss, a research project conducted by Alison Crosby and Malathi de Alwis (funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant). Through in-depth fieldwork, arts-based practices and methodologies, and community engagement, this five-year project (2014-19) examined survivor-led initiatives to memorialize loss in the aftermath of violence in Guatemala and Sri Lanka. Crosby and de Alwis sought to put their findings into conversation with other memorialization practices, to expand the scope and depth of transnational feminist praxis and collaboration. Extended conversations, collaborations, and a reading group in Toronto, Canada led to the formation of the Research Team and the rest, as they say, is history.

Through Remembering and Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Dialogues, we seek to foster critical dialogue, collaboration, and research innovation in feminist memory studies and to generate space for thinking about the role of transnationality in it all. We invite you to participate in these conversations in the emerging field of transnational feminist memorialization.

This project is housed at the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR), York University. The June 2021 workshop was jointly hosted by CFR and the Department of Equity Studies at the University of Toronto.