Vanessa Tautter

My PhD project explores diverse memories of ‘implication’ in histories of violence in the context of memory changes in Europe since the 1980s. It uses oral histories conducted in Austria (on memories of Nazism and World War II) and Northern Ireland (on memories of the Northern Ireland conflict) as case studies to establish how those socialised in previously more dominant memory cultures compose their own and/or their family’s life stories and reflect on histories of ‘implication’ in relation to these wider cultural shifts, and how they negotiate politically charged meanings of the past between the ‘private’ and ‘public’. The project examines emotional responses to these shifts, which were often experienced as challenging to subjectivities, identities and family histories, as well as memory work taking place in the private arena of the family. By doing so, the project seeks to understand political mobilisations of such ‘private’ memories and aims to create space for the critical study of heterogeneous cultures of implication and perpetration, and their meanings for society until today.

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