Call for Abstracts: 2024 Annual Millennium Symposium (Vol. 53)

(Now closed. Check back soon for the 2025 Annual Millennium Symposium CfP.)

Call for Abstracts

2024 Millennium Symposium and Vol. 53 Special Issue

Traversing memories in global politics

7-8 November 2024 | London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Memories are constantly invoked in global politics. As in the most recent conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine, memories constitute our understandings, identities, and behaviours at various levels from individuals to political belongings that transcend national boundaries. Researchers within and beyond the field of International Relations (IR) investigate memories in numerous ways. Some of this scholarly work includes, but is not limited to: how memories are conceptually distinguished (e.g. history and myth) and embodied (e.g. trauma and victimhood); how and why memories are (re)produced and circulated; and what implications they bear overall on global politics.

By traversing memories, this year’s Millennium Symposium is dedicated to pushing these academic efforts one step further. Traversing entails cutting across scholarly foci, all the while linking them to their broader environment. As such, we would like to underscore memories’ inherent capacity to blur the binary boundary between inside and outside, shedding light on their mobility, fluidity, and in-betweenness. The invitation is also a call to problematise and traverse onto-epistemological categorisation, fragmentation, and division of memories and scholarly works on them, making room for a multiplicity of theoretical lenses – ranging from postcolonialism and feminism to relationality, pluriversality, and anthropocene – in making sense of memories.

This year’s symposium aims at foregrounding memories’ volatile, yet enduring nature, as well as its implications for global politics. Specifically, we are interested in scrutinising not only their complex links to time/temporality, space/places, (non)humans, and legacies, but also their (un)stable capacity to traverse our own political and ethical imaginaries. Our intention is to encourage, enable, and sustain fruitful discussions from a multitude of voices across positionalities, geographies, and histories. We hope that our flagship event will expand our understanding of memories through critical, boundary-pushing, and transdisciplinaryreflections.  

In traversing memories in global politics, we would like to suggest exemplary sub-themes, including time, space, (non)humans, and legacies, and the following questions:

• How can we make sense of the volatility and simultaneous endurance of memories in global politics?
• How do memories relate to our understanding of the relationship between past, present, and future? 
• How are memories embodied and traversing space and places?
• In what ways do memories cut across pre-given time-space configurations and what’s their role in the construction of a shared ‘political’ time and space or lack thereof?   
• Whether, how, and why do memories traverse non-humans (e.g. weapons, objects, and nature)?
• What legacies do certain understandings of memory enable by traversing distinctions between past, present, and future?
• How do traumas shape our understanding of memory through time and space?
• How are traumas transmitted through time/generations and what are the political legacies they allow or foreclose?
• How is victimhood constituted through time, space, and (non)humans?
• How and why is victimhood projected to (un)related parties in global politics?

Logistics:

The Millennium Symposium is a two-day event with completed preliminary versions of papers circulated to all participants in advance. The papers and presentations will provide the basis for a sustained conversation amongst a select group of scholars. The Symposium will take place in-person on 7-8 November 2024 at the LSE. If you are interested in participating in the symposium and potentially contributing to the special issue, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by 9 June 2024 (23:59 BST). You will hear from us within a month whether your abstract has been accepted. If you are accepted, you will be asked to submit a partial draft (minimum 5,000 words) by 31 July 2024 (23:59 BST). The full draft (8,000-10,000 words) should be submitted by 30 September 2024 (23:59 BST). Papers will be circulated with fellow panelists at the beginning of October.

Please note that if selected, you will be expected to participate in-person for the full two days of discussion.

If you are interested, please upload your abstract to this submission form. For any questions or inquiries about the symposium, please contact us at millennium@lse.ac.uk.

Millennium especially welcomes submissions from early career researchers and scholars in the Global South. Some bursaries are available, which can help cover the costs of attending the symposium. Please indicate in the submission form if you would like to be considered for a bursary.

Once completing a successful peer-review process, a selection of contributions will be published as part of a Special Issue in Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 53 (3).

We look forward to receiving your submissions.