Fiona Larkan - Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis

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Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis

This book presents a social scientific reading of the challenges of memory and recovery in times of crisis. Drawing on different interpretations of what constitutes crisis, this collection uses lenses of economics, identity and commemoration, to question how memory and recovery is being constituted through larger discourses of political claims of moving forward, healing and identity.

Memory and Recovery in Times of Crisis examines how memory is dis- or re-interred through social processes and further, how recovered memories are challenged or legitimized. It also presents a set of questions that will stimulate further reflections on what kind of role understandings of memory of crisis can play in recovery. Given the world we find ourselves living in in 2017 a world subject to multiple, intersecting crises how we understand the dynamics of memory and recovery is a pressing issue indeed.

This book will appeal to both scholars and students of anthropology and sociology.

Dr Fiona Larkan is a medical anthropologist with a research interest in chronic disease and illness, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. For the past 15 years she has worked extensively in the area of HIV and related illnesses, and her PhD was a comparative ethnographic account of Sexuality and Risk in South Africa and Ireland. Based at the Centre for Global Health, Trinity College Dublin, Fiona has a strong commitment to education. She directs the MSc Global Health programme and is co-founder of the recently established Irish Medical Anthropology Network, which aims to develop social medical education throughout Ireland. She has published in anthropological and social medical journals; is the former editor of the Irish Journal of Anthropology and current Deputy Editor of Globalization and Health.

Dr Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist working at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queens University Belfast. She received her PhD in 2009 from the Department of Anthropology, Maynooth University for work focusing on the cultural modalities of trauma, memory and reconciliation amongst Aboriginal Australians who were forcibly removed from their families. Fiona has published a number of book chapters and articles on this work in American Anthropologist, Ethnos, History and Anthropology and The Irish Journal of Anthropology. Fiona is co-author of Integration in Ireland: The Everyday Lives of African Migrants (Manchester University Press, 2012).

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Memory Studies: Global Constellations

The past in the present has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that migrant memories; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.

This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We welcome manuscripts that examine and analyse these profound cultural traces.

Titles in this series

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Memory and Recovery in
Times of Crisis

Edited by Fiona Larkan and
Fiona Murphy

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Crisis, however defined, generates suffering this is a book dedicated to those who have suffered, or continue to suffer in worlds not of their own making.

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This book is a result of collective energies and conversations following an Anthropological Association of Ireland Conference in Sligo Institute of Technology in 2014, on the subject of Memory and Recovery. The idea for the initial conference emerged through conversations between AAI committee members with a focus on memory and recovery in an Irish context, and later evolved with the development of this collection, to include broader geographical contexts. The book bears the imprint of both Trinity College Dublin and Queens University Belfast. Our thanks go to the authors of the individual contributions in this book. Thanks also to friends and family who supported us through the process of this collection. Finally, we would like to thank Routledge. We hope this book will speak to a range of individuals working in different academic disciplines particularly in the context of widespread global disquiet in 2017. The importance of a social scientific reading of memory and recovery in the context of crisis cannot be understated and we sincerely hope this book goes some of the way to stress the importance of this relationship.