PhD conference
“Representing violence: (meta)narratives – memories – commitments”
18th-19th May 2026, the University of Tours
This international conference aims to provide a space for transdisciplinary and transnational reflection, while promoting training and networking of young researchers (PhD students and PhD holders -3 years) who explore collective violence, its memory and representations across Europe. The call is addressed to PhD candidates in humanities and social sciences: political studies, sociology, psychology, visual arts, history, performative arts, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, anthropology, law, economy. The conference will be followed by a multilingual digital publication.
Presentation
The deployment of high-performance technologies for the authoritarian management of populations (exploitation of resources, wars, exterminations and forced displacement) and for the control of representations of this violence has brought the issue of organised violence and the presence of its memory in the public sphere (politics, media, art) to the forefront of the concerns of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The webinar “Representing violence: (meta)narratives – memories – commitments” aims to reflect on the role of narrative in the individual and collective understanding of experiences of violence, namely:
1. The functioning of narratives (ordinary/life stories, professional or expert, artistic) as active memory, performative space and community archives: What role do narratives play in the formation of cultural memory as an alternative space for expression, particularly when the public sphere remains silent or repressive? How important can narrative accounts of situations of extreme violence and discursive responses to ongoing or unresolved conflicts be, especially when they do not trigger the mechanisms of institutional justice?
2. The psychological mechanisms underlying the poetics of extreme violence: How do stories of violence incorporate narrative and stylistic techniques such as fragmentation, silence, repetition, metaphor, and analepsis (narrative delay, flashbacks)? How do these linguistic processes relate to the cognitive and affective mechanisms highlighted by research in psychology (Caruth, 1996; van der Kolk, 2014), the philosophy of memory (Ricœur, 2000; Assmann, 2016) and literary theory? Can these traumatic experiences be grasped and thus overcome without resorting to narrative? Is there a relationship to violence that is not mediated by narration?
3. The reconfiguration of the relationship between individual and community in narratives of extreme violence: Post-industrial societies are communities of individual self-realisation, where the collective issues are seen as the antithesis of the personal (Beck, 2003; Gauchet, 2003). However, the disruption of this behavioural and axiological framework in societies experiencing organised violence requires a profound review of the relationship between the individual and the community. What alternative forms do accounts of traumatic experiences offer for linking together the individual and the collective, the private sphere and the public space?
4. The pitfalls of representing violence: The publication of accounts of experiences of violence necessarily has a political and/or ideological dimension, particularly in contexts of unresolved and ongoing conflicts. Can the instrumentalisation of these experiences be avoided? Similarly, can their artistic treatment avoid the anesthetisation of suffering (Sontag, 1978 and 2003)? Is it not the nature of narrative to “domesticate” painful experiences, to mitigate their (self-)destructive potential by giving them meaning or beauty (Benjamin, 1928)? Can an ethic of writing/speaking and reading/listening overcome the pitfalls of narrative?
5. The polyphony of narratives and its epistemological and social implications: The plurality and diversity of narratives that coexist in a discursive field often lead to reactions of generalised mistrust, denial and/or unconditional and partisan defence of one version of events. What effect does the plurality of narratives of a traumatic event have on the truth regime of the society that experienced it? How can institutions and legal texts respond to this epistemic climate of suspicion?
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Application Details
All young scholars willing to participate in this conference are invited to submit their application by addressing a short abstract (300 words) and an academic biography before the 18th April 2026 to: representerlaviolence@gmail.com . The applicants will be informed about the acceptance of their proposal within three days.
The host university offers lunches on both days of the conference as well as a social dinner on Monday evening.
Scientific coordination:
Liudmyla Harmash (Le Studium visiting fellow 2025-26 at the ICD research unit), Roxana Ilasca, Emmanuelle Séjourné and Anna Krykun (ICD, University of Tours).
Organising committee:
Jacobo Centanaro (Gustave Eiffel University/University of Tours), Marta Mateo Segura (University of Saragosse/University de Cergy), Pako Sarambe (University of Cologne/University of Tours).
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Selective Bibliography
Chris Andrews, Post-Conflict Literature: Human Rights, Peacebuilding, and Cultural Memory, Londres, Routledge, 2016.
Aleida Assmann, Les Formes de l’oubli, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, 2016.
—, Les Ombres de la mémoire. La politique de l’identité en Allemagne après 1945, Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2022 [2015].
Michelle Balaev, The Nature of Trauma in American Novels, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2012.
— (dir.), Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Laura Basu, Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis, Londres, Pluto Press, 2018.
Ulrich Beck, La Société du risque : sur la voie d’une autre modernité, trad. par Laure Bernardi, Paris, Flammarion, 2003.
Jens Brockmeiher, Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Astrid Erll, « Travelling Memory », Parallax, vol. 17, n° 4, 2011, p. 4-18.
Shoshana Felman et Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Londres - New York, Routledge, 1992.
Marcel Gauchet, La Condition historique : entretiens avec François Azouvi et Sylvain Piron, Paris, Stock, 2003.
Yifat Gutman, Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine, Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.
Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York, Basic Books, 1992.
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997.
—, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012.
Axel Honneth, Les Pathologies de la liberté : une réactualisation de la "Philosophie du droit" de Hegel, trad. par Franck Fischbach, Paris, la Découverte, 2008.
Ana Hutgren, « Transnational Memory and Literary Studies », Memory Studies, vol.14, n°3, 2021, p.250-265.
Roger Kurtz, Trauma and Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004.
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, Londres, Routledge, 2008.
Ewald Mengel et Michela Borzaga (dir.), Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2012.
Marita Nadal et Mónica Calvo (éds.), Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation, New York, Routledge, 2014.
Joshua Pederson, « Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory », Narrative, vol. 22, n° 3, 2014, p. 333-353.
Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009.
Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, New York, Fordham University Press, 2015.
Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, New York, Columbia University Press, 2010.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.
— , Regarding the pain of others, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Kalí Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Bessel Van Der Kolk, Le corps n’oublie rien. Le cerveau, l’esprit et le corps dans la guérison du traumatisme, Paris, Albin Michel, 2020 [trad. de The Body Keeps the Score, 2014].
Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, Édimbourg, Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
— (dir.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, Londres, Routledge, 2020.