The term “memory” is a framework concept that is collecting multidisciplinary academic disciplines beneath. Also, the term “memory,” at the individual level or at the social, or collective level has different connotations due to the interdisciplinary conceptualization of the memory itself. Memory can be seen in psychology, as relating to an individual, his / her ways to remember or forget, and amnesia. Else, memory can be regarded in the collective form and as a collectively shared representation of the past, or it can come up with political terms like national memory, public memory, vernacular memory, or counter-memory.

​Additionally, collective memories can also be regarded as a “floating gap” between memory and history. Therefore, remembering and amnesia play a significant role in defining the positioning of the memory. The “cultural memory,” comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each different time era which can be in the form of the texts, rites, images, monuments, and buildings that are designed to recall fateful events in the history of the collective. They are sanctioned as a common heritage of a society that is accumulated in the Longue Duree. As coined with individual and cultural memory “the idea of individual memory,” as Maurice Halbwachs states, “absolutely separate from social memory, is an abstraction almost devoid of the meaning.” How a nation remembers also defines a branch in memory studies because “nations can repress with psychological impunity; their collective memories can be changed without a ‘return of the suppress’”. Other than individual amnesia, we can speak about a social forgetting which links social, political, and cultural factors at work.

The interdisciplinary character of the memory links itself to various areas from psychology, sociology, history, identity studies, literary studies, urban history, space history, and media studies to discourse analysis, and other relevant fields linking the subject with the use of memory.

In 2019, The DAKAM Memory Studies Conference, in its fourth year, aims to provide a platform for discussions and research, which considers various aspects of literature as a memorial medium to contribute to the larger discussion of the ways in which societies and individuals recollect their past and as a field of observation of personal memory to explore and experience the complexities of the mind and emotions.

Scholars from different fields such as political science, history, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, urban studies, architecture, literature, poetry, art history, life sciences, and other fields are welcome to propose their interdisciplinary work at the conference.

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written by Özge Mumcu