Keynote Speakers

David Mwambari

Centre for Research on Peace and Development (CRPD)

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Keynote address: The displaced memories, silences and secrets of refugees: A new framework for narratives on the move

Summary: This paper explores how refugees’ life narratives are reshaped by forced migration. As people pass through countries of transition and destination, their disparate, travelling narratives are transformed. I argue that the displaced memories, silences and secrets (DMSS) conceptual framework can reveal refugees’ dynamic life narratives and appreciate their complexity and evolution over time and across space. I apply the DMSS framework to the lived experiences of African refugee families and communities in the United States and in East Africa to demonstrate the analytical value in recognising how active memories of ruptures and dislocations are intertwined with silences and open secrets in the societies where refugees transit and settle.

As the world faces multiple crises and fractured societies, it is useful to examine the tensions between refugees’ visible and concealed narratives—and their complex relationships with the hegemonic narratives encountered along the journey—to better understand the power disparate narratives of all kinds. 

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David Mwambari is an associate professor in faculty of social sciences at KU Leuven University. He is the co-winner of the APCG Best 2023 Book Award for his book ‘Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Postgenocide Rwanda’ (oxford University press). He is a life learner whose calling and profession is to research, teach mentor, and write on official and especially vernacular narratives of the past and how they shape societies and politics in different contexts in Africa and beyond. He is the principal investigator for the European Research Council (ERC)-funded “Life narratives of Violence Among Refugees from Africa’s Great Lakes Region (AGLR)” Project. David’s ethnographic research fuses arts-based and qualitative research methods that includes folklore, orature and the co-production of artistic performances. He has co-edited two special issues, published peer reviewed journal articles, poetry and essays. He was previously an assistant professor at King’s College London (UK), and the United States University-Africa (Kenya). David has also held postdoctoral position at Ghent University (Belgium), and visiting fellowships at McKenzie University (Brazil), The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Senegal), Cambridge University and Oxford University (UK). He studied in Kenya, South Africa, USA and Australia.

Francesca Polletta

Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine

Keynote address: The Trouble with Stories

Summary: Prophets, advertisers, politicians, and activists have long known the power of a good story. Stories absorb us, and lead us to identify with people who are very different from us. If they are effective, stories move us beyond witnessing injustice to acting against it. And they allow those who have suffered from injustice to recount their experiences in a way that should empower them. Today, with the help of narrative consultants and foundation support, advocacy groups often train their members to tell their personal stories. People who have been homeless tell their stories to potential funders, women who have been sex-trafficked tell their stories to policymakers, trans teens and undocumented immigrants tell their stories on YouTube.  But are personal stories as powerful as their champions make them out to be? And do the same stories that persuade audiences necessarily empower their tellers? I draw on interviews with advocates and communication strategists to sketch a kind of professional commonsense about personal storytelling for social change—and to identify some of the limits and risks of that commonsense. In particular, the notion that good stories create a relationship between audience and teller of something like intimacy may lead advocates to miss the power of stories that discomfit rather than inspire, that trouble rather than reassure.

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Francesca Polletta is Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She studies the cultural dimensions of protest and politics, asking how and when politically disadvantaged groups have mobilized meanings to make change. Her books include Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Univ. Chicago, 2002), It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Univ. Chicago, 2006), Inventing the Ties that Bind: Imagined Relationships in Moral and Political Life (Univ. Chicago, 2020), and, with Edwin Amenta, Changing Minds: Movements and Cultural Impact (Russell Sage Foundation Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a book titled The Trouble with Stories, which asks when stories persuade—and why they often do not persuade.

Michael Rothberg

The 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles

Keynote address: Disparate Worlds, Familiar Narratives: Holocaust Memory, Comparison Controversies, and Palestine/Israel

Summary: There are few other geopolitical conflicts that are as marked by the existence of disparate narrative worlds as the one in Palestine/Israel. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent war of destruction in Gaza, this situation has been exacerbated further, with consequences that have been felt around the world in clashes between protestors, states, and other institutions. In this talk, Rothberg will focus on one prominent place where narrative conflict has played out: in the genre he calls the “comparison controversy.” Comparison controversies consist of impassioned public debates that emerge from provocative historical comparisons or from the use of historical analogies to describe contemporary crises. Since October 7, political speeches, artworks, essays, and videos, among other forms, have generated controversy by connecting recent events in Israel and Gaza to National Socialism and the Holocaust. What happens when conflicting narratives are articulated in similar forms? Do such overlapping narratives only generate more conflict or can comparative memory provide grounds for potential solidarities? By exploring several post-October 7 comparison controversies, Rothberg will reflect on the current crisis of Holocaust memory and narrative.

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Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the social and cultural implications of political violence and its afterlives, and his writings have been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. His books include The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003; co-edited with Neil Levi), and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000). With Yasemin Yildiz, he is completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance. He has also written for public-facing venues such as Inside Higher Ed, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation, as well as German-language publications such as Die Zeit, Berliner Zeitung, and Geschichte der Gegenwart. The 2021 German translation of Multidirectional Memory prompted a national debate in the mainstream press about the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism.

Amy Shuman

Professor Emeritus of Folklore at The Ohio State University and past president of The Fellows of the American Folklore Society

Keynote address: Story Ownership: Stories that Aren't Heard

Summary: “Story Ownership” often refers to political efforts to shape public attitudes and opinions. Responses to losing control of the narrative can include reframing or reclaiming the narrative, launching counter-narratives, and telling one’s own story, strategies that are not always effective. In addition to exploring the meta-narrative claims made for narrative and the dynamics in which some stories are not heard and demonstrably false stories prevail, this discussion considers some of the real, material consequences of losing (and reclaiming) narratives in a variety of situations, including disability rights struggles and political asylum hearings.

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She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and The American Folklore Society Lifetime Achievement Award. She is a narrative scholar whose ethnographic and oral history research has focused on disability, political asylum, and Italian stonecarvers. Her books include Storytelling Rights: the uses of oral and written texts among urban adolescents; Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy; Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century (with Carol Bohmer); and Political Asylum Deceptions: The Culture of Suspicion (with Carol Bohmer).