Mobilizing MSA Forward

Memory Studies Association (MSA) Forward, like memory studies at large, is a multidisciplinary scholarly community that engages in dialogue with cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and Jewish studies, to name a few fertile fields of exchange. As we noted in our introduction to an interview with literary studies scholar and author of Diasporas of the Mind, Bryan Cheyette, “[r]ather than supplanting one another, these fields overlap, intersect, and cross-pollinate” (Teichler and Vince, 2019a: 95). Such intersections enable what Mieke Bal calls “travelling concepts” (Bal, 2002) which in turn relate to “traveling culture” (Clifford, 1986, 1992), a notion that Astrid Erll (2011) draws on in her conceptualization of “travelling memory.” According to Erll (2011), “much of the actual semantic shape that travelling memory takes on will be the result of the routes it takes in specific contexts” (p. 15). MSA Forward provides a stimulating space for these routes to be traced by postgraduate scholars looking at a range of case studies and employing interdisciplinary methodologies in their doctoral research. As Pat Bazeley (2003) notes, “[e]ffective research training provides a mastery of fundamental methodological skills, as well as in-depth substantive knowledge and advanced methodological skills in a particular research area” (p. 261), in this case, memory studies. In the context of MSA Forward, junior scholars are encouraged to explore “synergies and new directions” (Göttsche, 2019) in the context of collaboration and multidirectionality, as “a model based on recognition of the productive interplay of disparate acts of remembrance” (Rothberg, 2009: 309).

MSA Forward was founded to give a platform and provide a support network for (post)doctoral researchers working in and with such “disparate acts of remembrance” within the interdisciplinary field of memory studies. After the inaugural MSA Forward meeting that took place in 2017, just before the MSA conference in Copenhagen, we asked participants to provide feedback on the workshop and to share their thoughts with us. Cynthia Balé, then a PhD student at IDEAS-UNSAM/CONICET in Argentina, responded in the following manner:

The Memory Studies Association’s second annual conference provided a special forum for PhD students to explore the connection of our research to memory studies. A day before the conference began, twenty-three early-career researchers coming from different parts of the world gathered in the University of Copenhagen to present our projects, exchange ideas and share our research experiences. The workshop turned out to be a great meeting platform and [. . .] it set up the basis for future dialogue among new generations of memory scholars. (qtd. in Teichler and Vince, 2018)

Balé’s comment showcases the vision we had in mind when we pitched the idea of MSA’s very own PhD workshop to the founding co-presidents Aline Sierp, Jenny Wüstenberg, and Jeffrey K. Olick in 2016: We wanted to create a safe and productive intellectual milieu for early career scholars in memory studies. Having met as doctoral students ourselves at the PhD summer school accompanying the “Locating and Dislocating Memory” conference at University College Dublin in 2016 (as part of the research project “In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe”), we wanted to emulate such a supportive environment. Hanna Teichler had also benefited from several installments of the Mnemonics PhD summer school (described elsewhere in this issue), an early career network that was co-founded by prominent memory scholars who deemed it important to open up this burgeoning field to the next generation (Craps, n.d.). Simultaneously, Rebekah Vince co-founded EAJS Emerge, a similar initiative encouraging postgraduate students and early career researchers in the European Association for Jewish Studies to participate in ongoing debates in the field, while receiving support from senior colleagues in the pursuit of a career in academia. These initiatives demonstrate how necessary early career development is given “the importance of using the training period (doctoral and postdoctoral) to develop associations with distinguished researchers” (Bazeley, 2003: 261).

In this vein, the premise of MSA Forward was to provide feedback (or feed-forward) on work-in-progress doctoral research, while encouraging (or forwarding) emergent voices in the field who have something to say in shaping its scope. Taking our cue from the respondent model that Mnemonics has championed for more than a decade, we sought to invite established and mid-career scholars who work in memory studies alongside related fields and who were willing to share their advice on individual projects and to offer ideas on career development. The response to our pitch, the first call as well as the call for respondents, was overwhelming. The enthusiasm with which our idea was met indicates that there is both a desire and a need for such early career development schemes to exist. After having received more than 60 submissions, we selected 18 articles and participants from all over the world that demonstrated robust scholarship and a wide range of research interests (see Teichler and Vince, 2019b). The MSA provided us with a modest sum of money to support travel expenses for PhD students from the Global South. Eleven senior scholars joined us in the role of respondent and offered valuable advice during the first session of the “Career Café”—which we set up in a kind of “speed-dating” manner.

This inaugural workshop, hosted at the University of Copenhagen ahead of the MSA conference in 2018, explored (trans)cultural memories, conflicting memories, and mediatized memories to name a few forward-looking approaches that build on and challenge paradigms of transculturation and mediation in memory studies. One of the participants, Adebayo Sakiru Sam, concluded that “in its successful assembling of doctoral students from five different continents” and through facilitating “productive discussions,” the MSA Forward workshop “achieved its aim of serving as a platform for budding memory scholars to exchange ideas and explore the connections between their works and memory studies.”

Having co-organized the first workshop as PhD students ourselves, we decided to adopt a collaborative, relaying, and grounded approach going forward. Each MSA Forward session is organized in the context of the MSA’s annual conferences and by local PhD students, thereby giving them the opportunity to develop organizational skills and establish links with aspiring and established scholars across the world. Following this framework, the second MSA Forward workshop was hosted by Zoé de Kerangat and Julie Lavielle in Madrid, with a focus on “moving” memories—how memories travel through (e)motion and are activated through social movements. This theme chimes with the recently initiated Mobilizing Memories book series and handbooks, arising from our own collaboration, which was enriched by our involvement in MSA Forward. Through this series, which features former MSA Forward participants among its contributors, we explore how memory is “on the move” in constant motion—between communities, spaces, and temporalities—with the potential not only for mobility but also for mobilization in the service of diverging political ends (Bond et al., 2017). This can at times lead to backward-looking approaches or becoming stuck in the past rather than moving forwards, as memory is re-negotiated retrospectively and/or prospectively, drawing from nostalgic and utopic visions (or versions) of the past and future. As Meghan Tinsley notes, “future-nostalgia takes the gulf between past and present as evidence that society can be transformed, and imagines a new and utopian society” (Tinsley, 2020: 2329), which contains both potentialities and pitfalls in terms of (tinted or dashed) hope.

The third MSA Forward workshop, hosted by Hannah Wilson and Róża Kochanowska, took place online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that “[defamiliarized] standard notions and erstwhile experiences of time and space,” revealing an “ambivalence of compressed spatiotemporal connectedness and existential disconnect” (Parui et al., 2021: 1436). This workshop was dedicated to “Intersections of Memory” within the context of “Convergences” as the overall theme of the MSA conference in 2021. Prompting cross-fertilization across various intersecting fields of research, beyond multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary framings, memory studies can be seen as an unfenced field, and MSA Forward as a key player in the unfencing process.

Preceding and feeding into the recent MSA conference in Newcastle, the fourth MSA Forward workshop related to the overall theme of “Communities and Change,” which it embodies as a forward-looking community of change made up of postgraduate researchers at the cutting edges of memory studies. A key question in this context is that of engagement, whether advocacy or “thinking” activism (see Cheyette, 2017), particularly given the current political context, where emerging voices, given a platform through MSA Forward, are drawing from memory studies in ethical and imaginative ways to speak up and out against injustice.

Looking back on what MSA in general, and MSA Forward in particular, has achieved in terms of showcasing and enhancing the intersectionality of memory studies, we are delighted to see that there still is an appetite for initiatives that seek to represent the breadth of the field: the diversity of contexts and case studies, the many countries from which (early career) scholars in memory studies hail, as well as the many different and oftentimes challenging work environments that early as well as established scholars are forced to deal with. What Bazeley (2003) noted remains the case: “Even [perhaps especially] in social sciences and humanities, changes in orientation forced by difficulties in obtaining employment can result in feelings of isolation and sap enthusiasm” (p. 265). MSA Forward was founded in part to counter such sentiments through creating a supportive environment and networking context, where junior scholars can develop their research profile in dialogue with both peers and mentors. To build and foster networks is key to any academic career; they are the grid on which we can move, build alliances, and form collaborations. As Bazeley (2003) acknowledges, networks “open up employment and research opportunities as well as providing a stimulating source of critical discussion” (pp. 265–266). From our experience with MSA Forward, established and mid-career scholars in memory studies recognize the importance of forming networks early on in an academic career, as evidenced through the ways in which they have provided and continue to provide this postgraduate initiative with ample support. While it is important to receive constructive feedback on individual projects, to be able to speak with more experienced colleagues and to explore their specific pathways to a career in memory studies is invaluable, as is being given the opportunity to share original contributions on a level playing field.

The MSA has provided many resources in terms of career development and support in recent years: the Mentorship Program was founded in the wake of the first MSA Forward events and has successfully “paired up” early and more advanced scholars in memory studies. The First Book Award was set up to give recognition to early career publications and was recently extended to monographs in all languages, reflecting the multilingualism of the MSA and memory studies at large, international as it is. Each conference now has a Best Paper Award for junior scholars, where the winner is invited to develop their paper into an article for publication in the corresponding MSA special issue of Memory Studies. The Scholars at Risk Fellowship provides funding for international scholars who find themselves in perilous circumstances. More broadly, the Transformative Inclusivity initiative seeks to address structural racism and inequality within the MSA itself, but also in the wider field, and continues to work on policies and projects through which to tackle these issues as an association, or rather as a community of scholars, with MSA Forward representing those earlier on in their careers. There is much more work that needs to be done, of course, but we look back on the past 10 years and the development that the MSA has undergone with pride and joy. As we noted in 2019, “if Memory Studies is to be moving forwards as well as looking back, then it is important for emerging scholars as well as established academics to be at the forefront of the field,” on the front line of research (Teichler and Vince, 2019b: 93).