International Conference, June 3-5, 2025, organised by Sami Khatib & Jens-Peter Hanßen
 

This international conference was originally planned for 20-22 May 2024 under the title “Crisis, Memory & Critique” to mark the 25th anniversary of the foundational “Crisis & Memory” Summer Academy at the OIB. We decided to postpone and reconceptualize the conference’s framing in light of the Hamas Massacres on 7. October 2023 and the genocide Israel has been committing in Gaza with impunity as a result. The conference now takes place at the OIB from the evening of 3. to the evening of 5. June 2025.

We have since replaced the concept “crisis” with “catastrophe” in the event’s title to encourage our participants to consider what happens to our analysis if we adjust the scales of history and the stakes of our inquiry to the unchartered nature of our present. “Catastrophe, Memory & Critique” still aims to take stock of how the field of memory studies has metamorphosed and expanded internationally since the landmark OIB summer academy in 1998.

But we sense that the experiences and horizons of the 1990s were so utterly different and, indeed, much more stable than the experiences and horizons we inhabit in early 2025, that we call for new analytical registers, genealogical approaches and comparative angles to comprehend the present moment of history.

In times of genocide, war, economic collapse and fascist resurgences, our conference aims to interrogate the relationship between memory and critique in relation to three contested fields of research: (1) migration and memory politics in Europe and the MENA region (2) archives of catastrophe and critique in the Arab intellectual tradition; (3) overcoming genocide, war, and dictatorship.

The conference is generously sponsored by the German research Council (DFG) and gathers scholars of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, France, Germany and the Holocaust to explore collectively particularities and connections, new insights from the past and the very validity of past paradigms.

Authors: Sami Khatib & Jens-Peter Hanßen