Futures of Memory Conference 2027
Performing the Past, Witnessing (for) the Future: Memory in the Posthumanist Era
The early 21st-century understanding of memory as fundamentally ‘performed’ was predicated on the role of the body, or embodiment per se. Other theorists in this period analyzed the mediation of memory via objects—generally non-human objects or bodies, but also potentially including the human body. A theory of memory as performance or performativity foregrounds the process (representation, mediation; remembering, recollection) over the product (a specific memory), while also disrupting the longstanding conception of memory as virtual space or place of storage (archive). Memory as performance challenges such entrenched (and static) concepts, rendering memory a dynamic, organic, ever-unfolding force of perpetual (human) becoming. Yet, as humans, we are increasingly running up against our limitations as a species that has managed to generate, through remarkable intellectual capacity coupled with an extraordinary lack of foresight, a convergence of ‘natural’ and technological forces whose combined threat to humanity has no historical precedent.
What becomes of memory beyond the limitations of the human? What if the ‘body’ in question—not merely the object but the subject of memory—is that of the earth and its ecosystems, the ‘natural’ environment that is also the matrix of all life forms? Such a radically externalized, materialized and utterly non-virtual understanding of memory offers a radical challenge to psychological or psychoanalytic—and therefore anthropomorphic—theories of memory. Alternatively, what if the ‘body’ in question (the object and/or subject of memory) is a wholly artificial being—such as an embodied AI—created by humans in ironic fulfillment of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s dark forecast? (A fictional construct, Shelley’s creature has proven to be a remarkably prescient and adaptable allegory for the problems faced by humans in the second decade of the 21st century.) At what point is generative AI’s anthropomorphic interface (‘natural language’) trumped by its underlying large-language model operativity? In other words, what does memory mean for a radically non-human AI agent? How much more (or less) alien or non-human is this form of technologically based memory-in-action? How much more (or less) ‘authentic’ is it? How do we even understand authenticity in this context? Where it was once possible to believe that what was ‘human’ or ‘natural’ was authentic and real, whereas anything technology was artificial, fake, or inauthentic, this position has for some time now been untenable, not least since the astonishingly recent advent of generative AI. Since 2023 at least it has been apparent that what AI does first and foremost is to throw the question of the ‘human’ back in ‘our’ faces.
The conjunction here of environmental concerns, ultimately the climate crisis, on the one hand, and the emergent threat of AI-induced techno-social breakdown, on the other, is deliberate, given their real-world convergence, and given that both are human created, anthropogenic; both coincide in the Anthropocene as the epoch—and the apotheosis—of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. In this perspective, memory after the human means after the de-centering of the human, after the deconstruction of human exceptionalism, and after humans have ceased re-fashioning the world in their own image. This double re-contextualization of memory as ‘performance’ embodied within natural-ecological and/or technological spaces, structures, and systems, or their hybridized progeny, extends the consideration of memory in the 21st century into the timeframe of the Anthropocene and beyond, to the projected transformation of the object-world into a brave new world of radically non-human subject-agents. Rather than undermining the understanding of memory as performance in the present tense, this re-contextualization reframes it in critically posthumanist terms. Whether the example is the Holocaust or a projected post-apocalyptic future: in what sense is memory ‘performed’ when the bodies that experienced an event are no more? What does it mean to bear witness to the past in the present? And how can we turn the clarity of hindsight into the foresight that could become a witnessing for the future?
The conference organizers invite proposal for 15–20-minute papers on relevant topics and questions, including (but not limited to):
- Memory and the radically and meaningfully non- or more-than- or other-than-human
- Imagination and memory in the age of AI
- Queer perspectives and approaches to memory in the Anthropocene
- Indigenous knowledges and the environment: memory as land-based practice
- Indigenous knowledges and futurity: ‘blood memory’
- Decolonization: witnessing past violence
- Mediating witnessing for the future
- Performing Holocaust memory
- Performance and performativity: agency, self-awareness, authenticity
- ‘Unconscious’ memory: affect, emotion, embodiment
- Can authenticity be separated from embodiment?
- Mediating authenticity
- From biopolitics to necropolitics: memorializing the posthumous body
- Posthumanist cinema and/or literature and memory
- Premediation as memory of the future
- Performing commemorative landscapes
- Les lieux de mémoires: memory as place or space
- Les milieux de mémoires: memory as community
- Performing trauma in the Anthropocene
- Transgenerational trauma in the Anthropocene
- Memory and trauma as mediated in/through culture
- Climate witnessing and ecological grief
- Transcultural Holocaust memory
- The African Diaspora and transcultural memory
- Feminism and transcultural memory
- Neurodiversity and transcultural memory
- Animal studies and transcultural memory
- What do rocks remember?
Please submit a title and abstract (max 500 words) and a short bio (max 250 words) to Russell Kilbourn (rkilbourn@wlu.ca) and Stephanie Lewis (lewi2580@mylaurier.ca) by December 15, 2026. Results will be conveyed by mid-January 2027.
The organizers wish to thank Laurier’s Research Office, the Department of English and Film Studies, and the Dean of Arts office, for their generous support.
Description of Event:
‘Performing the Past, Witnessing (for) the Future: Memory in the Posthumanist Era’ is a 3-day conference happening May 03-05, 2027. This event is co-sponsored by the ‘Human Futures Now’ Faculty Research Centre (subject to approval), under the auspices of Laurier’s Research Office, and with the generous support of Laurier’s Department of English and Film Studies, and the Dean of Arts office.
The in-person only conference, to be held at downtown Waterloo’s Balsillie School of International Affairs, will bring together local and international scholars and practitioners to reflect, in a critical posthumanist context, on the turn in memory studies from textual and archive-based models of collecting and preserving fixed images and narratives to more recent models of embodiment, re-enactment, re-invention, performance, transmission, and education. The conference (and attendant film screening and other events) will be an opportunity for the critical exploration of individual and collective memory and historical witnessing as modes of performative and creative production, of agential self-fashioning, as specific events (e.g. the Holocaust) fade from lived memory, and the future’s horizon foreshortens, even as other issues (e.g. the climate crisis; the refugee crisis; the AI crisis) unfold in a digitally mediated present-tense ‘real-time.’
The conference will be structured around four keynote presentations, one each from the fields of memory studies and critical posthumanism, plus two creative presentation (filmmaker and other).
Waterloo, Ontario is in the heart of southern Ontario’s ‘Green Belt’; one-hour by car (1.5 by train or bus) from Toronto and Pearson airport.
For more information see the Futures of Memory website: https://specialprojects.wlu.ca/futures-of-memory/