PoSoCoMeS Seminar # 22. The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights. David & Bădescu

At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Lea David discusses her book entitled “The Past Can’t Heal Us! The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights” (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with Gruia Bădescu. About the book from the author: The world is, and has always been, very short on justice. The recent Black Lives Matter movement is just another example in a long line of collective appeals to repair historical injustices. In my book “The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights”, newly published with CUP, I show how we have come to think of historical injustice in terms of massive human rights abuses. This book brings into question one of the most basic, deeply-embedded assumptions in human rights and transitional justice: that ‘proper’ memorialization is a crucial step in establishing moral responsibility for past atrocities and, consequently, human rights values in conflict and post-conflict settings. The author: Lea David is an Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology, University College Dublin. Her work examines the globalization of human rights and memory politics, and their impact on nationalist ideologies in post and in-conflict settings. Her main research and teaching interests cover the interconnectedness of sociology of human rights and memory politics, nationalism and nation-state; human-object relations; ideology; solidarity; historical sociology; qualitative research methods; the Holocaust/Genocide nexus; the Balkan and the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. She has held various postdoc fellowships including a fellowship in Holocaust Studies, the Fulbright Fellowship, the prestigious Jonathan Shapira fellowship at Tel Aviv University, the Israeli Council fellowship for outstanding scholars, and a Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the School of Sociology at UCD. Her book manuscript “The Past Can’t Heal Us! The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights” published with Cambridge University Press (2020) was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association best book award, and was awarded the Honorable Mention for the 2021 ASA Sociology of Human Rights Gordon Hirabayashi Award. Her second book ‘A Victim’s Shoe, a Broken Watch and Marbles: Desire Objects and Human Rights’ will be published in 2024 with Columbia University Press. The discussant: Gruia Bădescu is a Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and was a lecturer and research associate at the University of Oxford. In 2018 he joined Konstanz as a Balzan Prize and Alexander von Humboldt fellow hosted by Jan and Aleida Assmann. Since 2020, he leads a research group on urban imaginaries after political ruptures at the Zukunftskolleg, investigating the reshaping of cities and narratives in the aftermath of war and dictatorship. One focus of his research is post war reconstruction in cities and dealing with the past, having done fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East. A second area of research is the memory of authoritarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe and South America, examined through comparisons and entanglements. He is a convenor of the Memory, Space and Place working group of the Memory Studies Association and a member of the European action group on dissonant heritage. His last publication is “Difficult Heritage in Southeastern Europe: Local and Transnational Entanglements in Memorializing Political Prisons after Socialism“ (2024), Journal of Contemporary History, 59 (1), https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae054.