Participation in the Ninth Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association

On July 14–18, we participated in the Ninth Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association (MSA), which took place in Prague—a city whose historical layers, political legacies, and cultural milieu provided a unique platform for collective reflection on issues of memory.

The conference, which brought together 1,200 presenters from all continents, was held at a time when the field of memory studies is undergoing a process of rethinking—shaped by the geographical diversification of academic centers and the emergence of new thematic research directions. With the participation of nearly all leading scholars in the field, discussions focused on the reconfiguration of memory studies discourses, particularly in the context of global crises, wars, forced displacements, and the weakening of democratic institutions. Set against the backdrop of major global anniversaries (the end of WWII in 1945, the end of the Vietnam War in 1975), commemorations of genocides and massacres (Srebrenica, 1995; Sudan, 2005), and ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, our aim was to bring visibility to the underrepresented case of the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) conflict and the mass ethnic cleansing of its Armenian population.

We examined how displaced Artsakh Armenians, stripped of international recognition and legal-biographical status, continue to resist erasure by reconstructing both personal and collective identity through acts of memory.

Within this context, a group of researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (Gayane Shagoyan, Ruzanna Tsaturyan, Gohar Stepanyan, Zara Hambardzumyan, Hasmik Knyazyan, and Shushanik Saratikyan) convened a panel titled: “Framing the Ongoing Crisis in Artsakh/Karabakh: Memory Instead of Biography.”

The panel featured five studies exploring how collective memory becomes central to belonging when biography is denied or criminalized by state discourse. Topics included:

• The materiality of memory and destroyed identity documents (Gohar Stepanyan, Identity Documents and the Forced Displacement of the Artsakh Population in 2023);
• Grassroots digital archiving as a tool of cultural resistance (Hasmik Knyazyan, Challenging Erasure: Grassroots Digital Archiving and the Reclamation of Cultural Memory After Forced Displacement);
• Memory of endurance and defiance during the Lachin Corridor blockade (Ruzanna Tsaturyan, Remembering Endurance and Defiance: Resistance in the Artsakh Blockade);
• Ethical and methodological challenges in teaching unwritten histories of displacement (Zara Hambardzumyan & Shushanik Saratikyan, Navigating Memory in Education: Challenges of Teaching in the Context of Forced Displacement from Artsakh).
  
  

Due to time constraints at the end of the panel, a choice had to be made between holding a discussion or presenting the final paper. Thanks to the gracious initiative of the panel moderator, Gayane Shagoyan, priority was given to questions and discussion. As a result, her compelling presentation titled “Framing Collective Trauma: Forced Displacement from Karabakh and Genocide Memory” was unfortunately not delivered in full. However, key aspects of her argument were later addressed in her opening remarks and during the Q&A session, where she provided valuable context on the historical and social dimensions of the Artsakh crisis.

Most of the research presented in this panel (except for Ruzanna Tsaturyan’s presentation) was conducted within the framework of the project “Artsakh: Digital Archive of Oral Histories,” supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Partial support for participation in the conference was generously provided by the Hovnanyan Family Foundation.