Jelena MARKOVIC

► Project : Transformations of memory in cultural bereavement

This project aims to investigate transformations of memory in cultural bereavement—grief at being culturally uprooted and losing one’s home country. Cultural bereavement, as resulting from immigration or refugee settlement, generates ruptures in collective and personal memories that bear on the formation of one’s self-identity and the progression of one’s grieving process. This project investigates the transformation of collective and personal memories in cultural bereavement, including how cultural bereavement and the ensuing changes to one’s self-identity affect the transmission of collective memories and how embodied memories serve as a form of first-personal access to cultural loss. This project employs an interdisciplinary approach combining philosophy—specifically, cognitive science, phenomenology, and moral psychology—with creative approaches including embodied writing and performance art.

The project has two components: (i) examining collective memories in immigrant and diaspora communities, and how their transmission intersects with changes to one’s self-identity that occur in cultural bereavement and (ii) looking to embodied and “Rilkean” memories as means of understanding ambiguous experiences of cultural loss. The outputs of the project include philosophical articles on the ethics of collective memory and embodied memory, a workshop on emotional memory, and a performance piece on grief and place developed in collaboration with the Performance Lab.

Jelena will be affiliated to the Centre for Philosophy of Memory (CPM), part of the Institut de Philosophie de Grenoble (IPhiG). She will work with Kourken Michaelian and Denis Perrin of the CPM. Jelena will also be affiliated with the Performance Lab, working with co-director Gretchen Schiller (Litt&Arts).