| NITMES will intensify the collaboration between a number of key players in the field of cultural memory studies and lay the foundations for new longer-term projects. In a series of international workshops and through regular exchanges between the participant institutions, NISMES will re-orient the conceptualisation and study of cultural memory away from the national frameworks in which it has long been studied to the transnational frameworks (European, regional, global) in which memory narratives are currently produced, circulated, and debated. Against this background, a central concern will be with the role of media (images, texts, new media, the arts) in crossing and re-negotiating cultural and national borders, and in evoking "imagined communities" beyond that of the nation. NITMES will help provide a cultural genealogy of the memory narratives that are currently being invoked within Europe and in the arena of international politics. It will also help provide alternative ways of conceptualising identity and "inheritance" that are better fitted to the contemporary world than the mono-ethnic conceptualisations of national memory that were dominant until quite recently, and that provide better tools for analysing contemporary narratives and their social impact. At an empirical level NITMES will extend our knowledge of the circulation of particular narratives and memorial practices across national and linguistic borders in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. Bringing together expertise relating to multiple regions, it will yield insight into the short and long term memories that are playing into, and shaping, recent social-political movements within Europe and beyond. |
