Institutional email: v.tautter@brighton.ac.uk
Over the past decades,
European memory cultures have become increasingly oriented towards the
experiences of historical victims, improving their position in contemporary
societies, whilst facilitating the decline of heroic, triumphalist and
apologetic accounts of the past. Particularly the transnationalisation of
Holocaust memory, approaches to transitional justice in conflict-affected
societies as well as related human rights discourse have been informing victim
imaginaries and narratives of victimisation in contemporary representations of
the past.
In this context, my PhD project explores how such changes in hegemonic memory
cultures have been experienced by those who identify, or used to identify, with
the previous cultural hegemony. I am interested in the ways in which they
compose memories of the past and position themselves in relation to the newly
hegemonic memory frames and the respective narratives of victimisation advanced
by them. Additionally, I am also interested in how the general shift in memory
culture and their personal positioning in relation to it affects their
relationship with political parties and cultural organisations.
To study the impact of memory change, my project analyses historical
developments in Austrian and Northern Irish memory cultures as case studies. In
both regions, cultural and political changes over the past decades have
facilitated a transformation of official memory culture, under the influence of
similar transnational shifts, Austria being more closely informed by the
mainstreaming of a transnational Holocaust memory and Northern Ireland by
approaches to transitional justice. I use oral history interviews with
individuals who at some point identified with right-conservative (Austria) or
loyalist (Northern Ireland) memory cultures to explore personal experiences of
such mnemonic change to establish how these shifts in transnational memory
frameworks have been perceived on a local level.
