Making Sense of the Past in Light of the Present
July 15th, 2010
Daniel Mai: Making Sense of the Past in Light of the Present: Collective Memory, Cultures of Remembrance and Your New Car
What do the Volkswagen Beetle, Konrad Adenauer and the Berlin Wall have in common? They are not only fashioned as established cultural icons through which ‘German identities’ are constructed, but also serve as highly symbolic markers of times gone by that are collectively remembered in common ways. But what does it actually mean to speak of the past in terms of ‘culture’ and ‘remembrance’? This lecture will give a short introduction to the field of collective memory studies – one of the ‘hot topics’ in the study of culture. Exploring the sociocultural aspects of memory, my aim is to provide students with a graspable explanation of the two influential concepts of cultural and communicative memory as well as cultures of remembrance. Being models of thought, these concepts not only enable us to understand how societies make sense of, reconstruct and revise their history. Breaking disciplinary boundaries, they can also be applied to modern companies in order to analyse (invented) corporate traditions and strategic processes of history and identity management.
Daniel Mai received his B.A. in Kulturwirt (English Literary and CulturalStudies, Business Studies) from the University of Duisburg Essen in 2007. From 2007 to 2009 he did his M.A. in Communication and Cultural Management at ZeppelinUniversity in Friedrichshafen and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Daniel Mai follows an interdisciplinary approach rooted in cultural studies. Since the fall of 2009 he has also been a member of the International PhD Programme (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” and is granted a scholarship from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). His research focus is on the critical exploration of cultures of remembrance in companies.