Figuring Memory: Social Practices and Collective Transformation with Thomas Van de Putte

Session 3:  "Cultural Memory from Event to Action"

Speaker: Thomas Van de Putte, University of Trento

Thomas Van de Putte will talk about his recently published book Contemporary Auschwitz/Oswiecim (Routledge 2021), an ethnography of a group of friends who live in the contemporary Polish town of Oswiecim, Auschwitz in German. Thomas will address the multiplicity of these people’s memory performances and use the interactional theories of Erving Goffman and George Herbert Mead to interpret them.

But Thomas Van de Putte will also talk about his current research on Memory and Morality in educational contexts (at the European level, in Belgium and in Poland), and on developing a theory of Memory in Action. Van de Putte will outline the main premises of a social theory of cultural memory that borrows from interactionally sensitive forms of cultural sociology, narrative sociolinguistics, and literary reader response theory.

Thomas Van de Putte is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. He earned his PhD in Culture, Media and Creative Industries from King's College London. Thomas works on Holocaust memory in Poland and Belgium, borrowing theoretical approaches from sociolinguistics and cultural sociology. Before entering academia, he worked as an investigative journalist for news outlets across Europe.   

Discussant: Dr. Ewa Tartakowsky, CNRS, CFC at the University of Warsaw

Dr. Ewa Tartakowsky is a sociologist, a CNRS researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of Politics (UMR 7220) and associated researcher at the Centre of French Civilization and Francophone Studies at the Warsaw University. All her work focuses on Jewishness analyzed from non-confessional point of view. She has worked on French writers of Jewish-Maghreb origin in a post-colonial French context and her new research, based on archives, textbooks, ethnographical observations and interviews, concerns the transmission of the Jewish past in the Polish schools since 1989. She is the author of Les Juifs et le Maghreb : Fonctions sociales d’une littérature d’exil (PUFR, 2016) and edited with Marcelo Dimenstein two volumes about Jewishness in contemporary Europe : Juifs d’Europe: Identités plurielles et mixité (PUFR, 2017) and Between Memory and Everyday Life: Jewish Europe Today (Austeria, 2020).