Tuesday, Mar 31, 2026

CALL FOR PAPERS vol. 71 (2027/2)

Collections of Identities and Topographies of Counter-Memory

This thematic issue will focus on the analysis of grassroots, community-based, and non-institutional practices of producing knowledge about the past. Particular attention will be given to community museums, local memory initiatives, and counter-hegemonic narratives in collection management that emerge in response to the systemic erasure, trivialization, or depoliticization of historical experiences of violence, exclusion, and marginalization.

We are especially interested in practices that involve intensive yet immaterial epistemic, affective, and ethical labor within the field of memory and politics (or the politics of memory). Operating with minimal material resources, such practices restore narrative agency, reconstruct historical continuity, and challenge mechanisms of denial and euphemization present in dominant museum, educational, and tourist narratives.

The issue will foreground reinterpretations, ruptures, and discontinuities in the public representation of experiences articulated by minorities, diasporas, and subcultures seeking to assert their own identity narratives within the broader field of socially constructed knowledge (ethnographic, anthropological, historical, geographical, etc.). We are also interested in counter-memory as a form of epistemic repair, enacted by marginalized communities in response to structural absences, silences, and depoliticized accounts of historical violence. Particular attention will be paid to the educational and pedagogical dimensions of exhibitions, commemorative publications, and events that reconstruct or contest institutionalized narratives.

We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to:

  • grassroots museums and community archives as alternative knowledge infrastructures,
  • speculative and reconstructive approaches to collections and permanent exhibitions,
  • memory walks, historical routes, guided tours, and activist forms of public narration,
  • grassroots, educational, and engaged tourism as counter-narrative practice,
  • reenactment groups, site-specific narratives, and performative modes of storytelling,
  • vernacular and communal memory as a form of epistemic repair,
  • relationships between memory, dignity, recognition, and narrative agency,
  • reactivation of historical violence in relation to contemporary social conflicts,
  • tensions between official narratives, “sustainable” tourism, and vernacular accounts,
  • the material modesty of memory practices versus their symbolic and affective intensity,
  • informal education projects addressing gaps in official curricula,
  • guides, narrators, and community leaders as figures of epistemic authority.

We welcome submissions grounded in diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks, including:

  • folklore studies and vernacular narrative research,
  • anthropology of memory and anthropology of mobility,
  • memory studies and heritage studies,
  • postcolonial and decolonial studies,
  • social epistemology (including epistemic injustice and repair),
  • studies of counter-history, counter-archives, and grassroots knowledge,
  • archaeology of knowledge and critical museum studies.

 

Submission

  1. Manuscripts in Polish or English should be submitted by 30 November 2026 via the APCZ platform: https://apcz.umk.pl/LL
  2. Manuscripts should be original and not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and must adhere to the journal's guidelines, available on the website https://apcz.umk.pl/LL/about/submissions
  3. Planned publication date: October 2027
  4. For inquiries regarding this thematic issue, please contact the guest editors: