CFP & Symposium: Commemoration, memory, archive - investigating commemorative and memorial uses of personal, non-professional photography in the digital age in the Global South

The commemorative and memorial use of personal, private images in the context of large-scale violence and death has a long history. Private images have been continually employed to access worlds that no longer exist, to de-anonymize, individualize or humanize victims, to identify murderers and the murdered, to evidence contested events and to prove the existence of life before death. They populate archives, memorials and museums, places of public protest and, increasingly, myriad regions of the internet. 

Yet in this movement from the private to public, from intimacy to historical significance, private images undergo transitions (including for example displacement, re-contextualization and politicization) in a manner that raises critical challenges for both commemorative practices and those to whom the images initially belonged. To what extent, as some scholars have argued, does this use of private images become part of a trend to globalize and homogenize commemoration, such that local contexts are overwritten? Similarly, where are issues of access, copyright and meaning addressed, particularly with the rise of the digital, and state-controlled, centralized memory-making? 

This two-day symposium at the University of Sussex aims to explore real and perceived changes in the relationship(s) between private still images and the memorialization and commemoration of mass violence with a particular focus on practices in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and South and Central America in the digital age.