CfP: Decolonization Strategies and Memory Work in Popular Culture (University of Ljubljana, 20-21.4.2026) Deadline: 23.10.2025
Decolonization Strategies and Memory Work in Popular Culture
Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana
International Conference: April 20-21, 2026
This conference approaches popular culture as a vibrant site of memory work (Kuhn 2000) – the practice of actively engaging with the past to understand, reinterpret, and challenge dominant narratives about it, with the aim of interrogating and transforming ways of feeling, being, and acting in the present. In the context of popular culture, memory work ranges from diverse readings, commentary, and creative re-appropriation and re-use of popular-cultural texts, to pursuing cultural production, distribution, and canonization models informed by insights into the mechanisms and mechanics of collective remembering and forgetting. For example, memory work may result in shifts in people’s mnemonic priorities, such as a reorientation from events to slow transformations, from victims and perpetrators to implicated subjects, and from monuments to ephemera and communities. It may also facilitate the articulation of unity in contexts that are habitually described as diverse, hybrid or transnational (cf. Bhaba 2000; Ebanda de B’béri 2009; Mwambari 2021).
Recent research on memory work as a method and device in cultural production (cf. Jarvis 2021; Mironescu 2024; Bukowiecki 2020; Cuder-Domínguez 2023) has yielded potent insights into decolonial practices – efforts to rethink knowledge production, representation, and institutional structures to challenge and dismantle colonial legacies by foregrounding marginalized (e.g., non-Western, economically and politically (semi-)peripheral, queer, feminist) perspectives advocating for epistemic diversity, community collaboration, and non-extractivist methodologies in scholarship, teaching, and public engagement (cf. Puar 2007; Blaser 2009; Arondekar 2009; Rosario Acosta López 2021; Hui 2023; Risam 2018). For example, Michael Rothberg (2009) has influentially proposed the concept of multidirectional memory, showing how memories of different historical traumas, such as colonialism and the Holocaust, can intersect, rather than compete, fostering solidarity.
This conference advances the conversation about the decolonial and mnemonic impact of cultural production as a site that facilitates dealing with the past, reclaiming identity, and resisting oppressive systems by engaging with contemporary popular culture. As a site of increasingly networked and decentralized meaning and feeling contestation, negotiation, and transformation, contemporary popular culture is significant to the unfinished project of epistemic decolonization. By epistemic decolonization, we refer to the articulation of the diversity of cultural practices, forms, processes, and regimes of production, circulation, and consumption that disrupt colonial imperatives, such as Western claims to the universality of knowledge. Additionally, epistemic decolonization refers to the examination of the complex entanglements of cultural production with the (neo)colonial economic, political, epistemological, and cultural paradigms that contribute to the proliferation of injustice, inequality, and violence. In the context of the current geopolitical struggles between the US and China, Europe and Russia, as well as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine (cf. Gržinić 2024; Latysh 2024; Tlostanova 2025), advancing the project of epistemic decolonization is of vital importance to reclaiming hope and radically re-imagining futures.
We invite presentation and panel proposals that address the relationship between decolonization, decolonial practices, memory work, and popular culture (e.g., film, popular music, murals and graffiti, (video) games, memes, YouTube, TikTok, etc., and related communities of practice and of affect, networks, and spaces) in the 21st century, focusing on (but not limited to) the following topics:
Production, circulation, and reception of popular-cultural memories from/about Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, South America the Middle East, and diasporic communities;
Popular-cultural (re)mediation of marginalized and/or peripheral memories as a strategy of resistance and identity formation;
Memory politics in (semi-)peripheral popular cultures: remembering celebrities, genres, aesthetics in the context of crises and transitions;
Decolonial memory work in popular culture across geopolitical contexts;
Responsibility, accountability, implication, and solidarity in popular-cultural memory;
Memories of hope, joy, and the future in (semi-)peripheral popular cultures;
Slow memory in popular culture: remembering gradual technological, cultural, and environmental transformations;
Spaces and infrastructures of decolonial practices and memory work in popular culture: film and music festivals, street art districts, online communities;
Feminist, queer, and minoritarian popular-cultural production and memory work;
Reappropriations and creative re-uses of communism and socialism in digital cultures (TikTok, YouTube, video games);
Street art, murals, and other grassroots visual cultures as tools of decolonial and memory work;
Relationship between vernacular memory and popular-cultural media, forms, and flows;
Multimodal (verbal, visual, material, aural, gestural) aspects, intermedial, and transmedial aspects of multidirectional memory;
Epistemological and methodological challenges in researching cultural production and memory on the (semi-)periphery;
Responses to the methodological challenges that arise from combining analogue/digital data, cross-border media analysis, and working across disciplines.
Abstract Submission Deadline: October 23, 2025
Submissions accepted at: info[at]mempop[dot]eu
Please submit 300-word abstracts (including the title of the presentation, the main text, and a list of sources) and 100-word bios to info[at]mempop[dot]eu.
Panel proposals should consist of a brief (150-word) panel description, 3-4 300-word presentation proposals, and the presenters’ bios. Should a panel proposal not indicate a moderator, one will be assigned by the organizers.
The conference will be held in English. Notifications regarding accepted contributions will be circulated in November 2025. This is an on-site only event. There is no registration fee for this event, but the participants need to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses.