User:Clajuve

Memory Studies Association
The Memory Studies Association (MSA) is an international scholarly association for academics and practitioners working in Memory Studies and related fields, including museology, archival studies, oral history, public history, the arts, and others. The association currently has approximately 1500 members from more than 40 countries and is associated with the journal Memory Studies, published by SAGE Publishing, as well as with a book series, Worlds of Memory, published by Berghahn Books.

History
The Memory Studies Association was founded informally at its “inaugural” conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands in December 2016. It was subsequently registered as a non-profit organization in Maastricht, Netherlands, on June 26, 2017. Besides the “inaugural” conference in Amsterdam, the MSA has held two subsequent annual meetings: one in Copenhagen, Denmark, December 14-17, 2017, and one in Madrid, Spain, June 25-28, 2019. More than 600 attendees attended the Copenhagen conference, which featured over 80 panels, five poster sessions, multiple film screenings and workshops. Due to ongoing debates about the remains of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the Madrid meeting repeatedly made front page news in Spanish newspapers. The presence of the MSA in Madrid was also advertised by the City Council of Madrid, which hung banners on lampposts and bus stops throughout the city center. A subsequent meeting planned for June 2020, to take place in Charlottesville, USA, was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The fifth MSA annual conference, originally scheduled for July 2021 in Warsaw, Poland, was moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.In June 2021, the Indian Network for Memory Studies, the first Asian national network in the field, was launched virtually under the aegis of the MSA. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sixth MSA annual conference, planned for July 2022, to take place in Seoul, Korea, was canceled.

Keynote speakers at MSA meetings have included Jan Gross, Joshua Oppenheimer, Marianne Hirsch, Aleida Assmann, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pierre Nora, Daniel Levy, Erica Lehrer, Jonathan Bach, and Carol Gluck, amongst others.

Mission
The mission for the MSA has been laid out in the article The Memory Studies Association: Ambitions and an invitation, published in the Memory Studies journal in October 2017, as follows:"The MSA … hopes to be the central forum for scholars from around the world and across disciplines who are interested in memory studies. Its goal is to further establish and extend the status of memory studies as a field, institutionalizing memory studies in a way that is able to provide fundamental knowledge about the importance and function of memories in the public and private realm."In addition, the Association’s by-laws also state the following specific aims: — to move beyond the Euro/Anglo centrism that has underwritten the development of memory studies through connecting memory scholars and practitioners across the world.

— to connect with practitioners, artists, and policy-makers, making the MSA a forum not only for scholarly debate, but one through which scholars can make connections to more practical realms, and practitioners and producers of memory can learn about the state of the art in memory scholarship.

— to explore the possibilities for, and limits on, genuinely interdisciplinary work and cross-disciplinary exchange. For instance, we continue to explore the boundaries between social/cultural concepts of memory and psychological/neurological ones.

— to connect with and offer a home for our existing “sister fields” including heritage studies, oral history, transitional justice, and archival studies.

— to represent the interests of memory studies as a community of professionals through offering professional development activities and career boosting services.

— to increase the visibility of memory studies with both state-based and private funders of academic research and community outreach, as well as with publishers.

— to contribute to memory-related conversations as they arise in public affairs and ethical debates.

Governance
Since its founding, the Memory Studies Association has been led by three “co-presidents”: Jeffrey Olick, Aline Sierp , and Jenny Wüstenberg. Six additional members of an Executive Board include Stef Craps, Francisco Ferrándiz, Alicia Salomone, Tea Sindbæk Andersen, Hanna Teichler and Joanna Wawrzyniak. The Association is also governed by an Advisory Board and a number of other committees. In 2021, Sarah Gensburger was elected President of the MSA.

The Association also includes the activities of a large number of Working and Regional Groups, and has been aided by the work of numerous interns, many of whom have received academic credit through Maastricht University, Netherlands.