Tuesday 8 February 2022
- Speaker: Polly Winfield, University of Bath
- Time: 13.15-14.05
- Title: Diaspora Memories and the Virtual Museum: Remembering Lost Homelands
- Abstract: We will present outputs from our research, carried out with two diasporic memory organisations, Kresy-Siberia and Houshamadyan, which have both developed internet platforms to collect and share information about lost homelands: in the former case, the pre-World War II eastern borderlands of Poland; in the latter, the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire that were destroyed by genocide. Our subsequent paper, which draws from the interviews undertaken with participants, examines the activism of these two diasporic memory groups and analyses the relationship between memory practice and the online space. We will discuss what difference the creation of an online platform makes to such groups, both for individuals and for the wider diaspora, and seeks to understand how the possibilities offered by these platforms shape diasporic practice.