CALL FOR Applications International SUMMER SCHOOL

About the Summer School

The summer school Histories of resistance: remembering and archiving political and
environmental conflicts offers an international and interdisciplinary exchange on political
and environmental conflicts. It takes Colombia, a country of rich biodiversity and a long
history of numerous violent conflicts that have affected both the cities and the rural regions,
as a starting point to reflect upon conflicting memory cultures in the global present past.

Conflicts cause long-lasting traumas and material and immaterial wounds in living
ecosystems and social ecologies. While some past events become part of the historical
memory and are remembered in local, regional or national cultural forms and practices , e.g.
of music, performances, art, or literature, others remain engraved as damages within the
diverse ecosystems, and are still invisibilized. The summer school seeks to foreground
practices of remembering and archiving as forms that resist forgetfulness, and help claim
both political participation and historical and cultural recognition. Following this, the soil is
conceived as an archive of violence and displacements through which the cultural relations
between people and ecosystems have been permanently disrupted. The focus lies on the
peace process in Colombia, in which the role of memory and archive in coming to terms with
the multi-layered conflicts on the Colombian territory are explored. Special attention is given
to the artistic forms and aesthetic practices that resist forgetting and are used as an integral
part of the peace process. The summer school seeks to identify new speculative
propositions and creative responses and to acknowledge these forms and practices as
histories of resistance.

The thematic threads of the summer school will address local and collective ecologies and
knowledges, tangible and intangible forms of resistance to forgetfulness, emergent
institutional and non-institutional archives of civil society, foregrounding the critical and
creative capacity of the arts and aesthetic articulations of healing, reparation, restitution and
peacemaking. In workshops, seminars, and public events the summer school aims to
address the following perspectives:

• Linguistic and cultural patterns of historical conflicts, their narrativizations and
  contemporary effects.
• Contested memories of conflict in soil, urban and rural spaces, museums &
  collections.
• The performance of human and non-human rights in aesthetic forms and practices.
• Circulation and negotiation of memory in Latin American literature from a global perspective.
• Memorial sites and artifacts as renegotiations of public space and historical memory. 

The summer school welcomes participants from the following academic and artistic fields:

Literature, cultural studies , linguistics, history and visual/environmental history, the arts, art
history, humanitarian and environmental law, human geography, performances studies,
architecture and urban planning, anthropology and ethnology, peace studies, philosophy.

For more information in English, click here.

For more information in Spanish, click here.