The Slow Memory Podcast

The COST Action  Slow Memory  (2021–2025), led by Jenny Wüstenberg and Joanna Wawrzyniak, brought together 323 scholars from 44 countries to reframe memory studies. Emerging from a critique of event-focused, fast-paced approaches, the project emphasized slow-moving, dispersed, and structural temporalities of memory. Organized into five working groups, it explored industrial decline, welf...

In this episode of the  Slow Memory Podcast , members of the COST action travel to Brussels to explore the House of European History’s  Present Pasts  exhibition through the lens of “slow witnessing.” Guided through powerful photographic projects that reimagine how Europe remembers, they focus on two striking case studies: Julien Sales’  Glacier, The Last Image , a haunting sel...

This episode of The Slow Memory Podcast features Dr Lucy Bond and Dr Jessica Rapson, co‑chairs of Working Group 5 (Transformation of the Environment), in conversation about their British Academy and Leverhulme Trust–funded research on heritage, industry and environmental racism in the American Gulf States. They explore their approach to immersive, slow ethnography—spending extended time in the reg...

The concept of solidarity occupies a central yet contested place in the history of Europe’s labour movements. Frequently invoked by trade unionists across ideological traditions, its meanings have never been singular or fixed. Drawing on life story interviews with retired union activists from several European countries, this podcast – hosted by Joanna Wawrzyniak and Natalie Braber – explores how s...

In this episode, members of working group four examine slow processes of remembering after the Yugoslav wars and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Inspired by their COST Action meetings in Belgrade and Belfast during 2024, co-chairs of the working group, Orli Fridman (Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications and Professor of the School for International Training, Belgrade) an...

In this episode, we introduce Slow Memory in arts-based practices of care.   The episode features three pioneering arts-based practices from Argentina that generate significant, slow-moving transformations in mental health care. They promote the rights of people who experience mental suffering: the right to play, the right to dream, the right to be listened to, to be remembered. This is key,...

In this episode, Members of Working Group 3 on the Transformation of Politics explore the history of International Women’s Day and how this date can be understood as a “slow commemoration”. Slow commemoration refers to dates in our calendar that appear to commemorate or celebrate something specific yet whose meaning is slippery. Slow commemorations attach themselves to multiple histories and multi...

Susana Gomes da Silva, coordinator of Education at the Modern Art Museum, from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal; Blerta Hoçia, a curator from the Humanitarian Law Center, based in Kosovo; and Professor Vicky Karaiskou, from the Open University of Cyprus, delve into the meanings of slow curating and what slow curating has entailed in their curatorial work. Against the backdrop of the t...

Memory Studies has been very much shaped by how societies remember extreme violence and sudden conflicts. However, Slow Memory researchers believe that the key social challenges of today – climate change, disinformation, accelerated technological advancements, economic inequalities, and conflicts over values – require not only a rethinking of the conceptual tools but also changes in the methods of...

In this era of rapid acceleration, scholars are subjected to unprecedented pressures to deliver at a pace that is unsustainable. The “boom” in memory studies and memory practice since the 1980s is one expression of this sped-up environment. We operate in systems that require the fulfillment of simultaneous roles of teacher, researcher, administrator, manager, counselor, networker and more. All of...