Conference “Give the Right Word to Things”

Event program

In the 20th century, Polish society underwent many significant political and economic events that resulted in mass migrations, forced resettlements and hasty escapes. As a result, Polish society has largely become a post-migration society, whose members are marked by the phenomena of uprooting and oblivion, the rupture of generational continuity and existence in places with interrupted structures of long duration.

The testimonies, companions, but often also difficulties of these migration experiences – were and still are (even within the processes of post-memory) various kinds of things – functional, sentimental, familiar/foreign. During the proposed conference, we would like to consider primarily the role of things in the processes of change provoked by the post-Yalta decisions, although we also take into account other time perspectives, especially contemporary ones.

We are interested in issues related to the lives of subsequent generations in the lands annexed to Poland as a result of the decisions of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. We would also like to address the issue of Jewish objects or remnants of other regional and ethnic cultures present within the borders of present-day Poland that have been deprived of their heirs. An important goal of the conference will also be to analyze the processes of tabooing, appropriating and discovering these testimonies in public and private spaces, both in Poland and more broadly – ​​in Europe.

We also want to address the subject of objects from the perspective of internal migrations, often of a class nature, which in the period of the Polish People's Republic marked the biographies of subsequent generations, migrating primarily from the countryside to the cities.

We invite representatives of such disciplines as sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, history, art history and museology to reflect on the social and cultural contexts of these (real or existing in narratives) objects, on the relations and dependencies that occur between them and their owners or communities in which they exist; on the processes of memory and forgetting that encompass them.

Proposed thematic areas (not exhaustive of the issues of interest to us):

- taming space by taming things
- things as a troublesome, difficult, abandoned heritage
- appropriation of things – appropriation of memory
- third and fourth generation (grandchildren’s generation) towards inherited things
- musealization of things
- things as a supracultural/supranational link
- things as a witness to the past
- cultural biographies of things
oblivion/forgetting and things

Organizers:

Department of Borderland Sociology of the Institute of Sociology of the University of Wrocław, Polish Memory Studies Group, Wrocław branch of the Polish Sociological Association, OP ENHEIM and the Urban Memory Foundation.

Organizing committee:

Dr. Kamilla Biskupska
Dr. Julita Makaro
Dr. Natalia Niedźwiecka-Iwańczak
Dr. Agata Strządała (conference secretary)