How colonial, imperial, militarized and state violence are remembered and memorialized—through, for example, memorials, museums, archives, performances, and art installations—are sites of constant contestation and anxiety. Questions of who and what gets remembered or forgotten, whose loss mourned and grieved, and how, what kinds of memorialization processes are assigned cultural value and how others are made absent, are shaped by racially gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities and imaginaries. They also emerge within and are shaped by–sometimes in resistance to–transnational relations, discourses, ideologies, market flows, border controls, migration patterns, legal frameworks, media culture and more. Invoking a broad, critical and intersectional understanding of the transnational that attends to the particularities of place-based struggles and difference experiences as the grounds from which to explore connections, similarities and coalitional possibilities within, across and through borders and contexts, this project centrally asks what a transnational feminist lens might reveal about the space of remembrance and memorialization. Simultaneously, it seeks to explore what the lens of memory and memorialization may conversely illuminate about our transnational feminist engagements, scholarly, artistic, activist and otherwise.

Remembering and Memorializing Violence: Transnational Feminist Dialogues brings together feminist scholars from a wide range of contexts and disciplinary perspectives to explore the transnational dimensions of how we collectively remember and memorialize violence. Through events, workshops, publications and an interactive digital archive, we foster critical dialogue, collaboration and research innovation in feminist memory studies.

Month: Jan   Year: 2019

Month: Dec   Year: 2021

This project uses a transnational feminist lens to examine when and how survivor-led initiatives to memorialize loss in Guatemala and Sri Lanka create new articulations of agency, voice and community within and across national borders.The project is a collaborative initiative with Sri Lankan cultural anthropologist Dr. Malathi de Alwis, along with Maya k’iche’ anthropologist Dr. Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj, and Heather Evans (PhD student, York University).

Guatemala and Sri Lanka have each endured decades of armed conflict that have had and will continue to have devastating effects on generations. How these wars are remembered and memorialized—through such devices as memorials, monuments, tombstones, archives, photographs, murals and art installations—are sites of constant contestation and anxiety. Memorialization practices are embedded in postwar relationships between and among individuals, communities and the state that are fraught and fractured, and laced with grief and anger about the lived experiences of violence and loss, victory and defeat. They also present an opportunity for survivors to (re)inhabit loss, to mobilize grief to create a new form of political community. Memorialization practices have transnational dimensions; the traveling of gendered racialized memorializing tropes, signs, claims, and power relations across borders informs and shapes how and by whom the experience of violence is represented and redressed. The project explores the place-making potential of memorialization initiatives by survivors in Guatemala and Sri Lanka and the organizations who accompany them, including the search for disappeared loved ones, and the struggle for redress for racialized gendered violence, including sexual violence. We also examine how the Sri Lankan and Guatemalan states and militaries have memorialized their wars.

Month: Apr   Year: 2014

Month: Mar   Year: 2019

This eight-year feminist action research project examined a group of Mayan women’s collective struggle for justice in the aftermath of harm suffered during the height of Guatemala’s genocidal violence in the early 1980s, a harm these protagonists contend is irreparable yet must be redressed. The project was a collaboration with Professor M. Brinton Lykes (Boston College), along with research partner the National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAMG). Crosby and Lykes co-authored the book Beyond repair? Mayan women's protagonism in the aftermath of genocidal harm (Rutgers University Press, 2019), published in Spanish as Más allá de la reparación: Protagonismo de mujeres mayas en las secuelas del daño genocida (Cholsamaj, 2019; translated by Megan Thomas).

In Beyond repair? Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes explore a group of Mayan women’s collective struggle for justice in the aftermath of harm suffered during the height of Guatemala’s genocidal violence in the early 1980s, a harm these protagonists contend is irreparable yet must be redressed. Drawing on eight years of feminist participatory action research (PAR), the book examines how Mayan women’s protagonism has been shaped through dialogic interactions with intermediaries, including Mayan, ladina, mestiza and transnational activists, feminists, lawyers, psychologists, interpreters, and the authors as researchers. Crosby and Lykes trace how intermediaries accompanied Mayan protagonists in the performance of a “community of women” outside of their local geographic communities, as a space from which to enact actions for redress and engage in knowledge co-construction. In analyzing protagonists’ engagement with a Tribunal of Conscience, a paradigmatic legal case of sexual violence as a crime against humanity and a state-sponsored National Reparations Program—actions framed as “transitional justice”—as well as the authors’ PAR process, the book addresses a central tension between indigenous struggles to redress social suffering rooted in structural colonial violence and dispossession, and the tendency of Western rights-based regimes to individuate acts of harm and generate racialized gendered spectacles of pain and suffering, accentuated in cases of sexual harm. Crosby and Lykes consider the challenges and possibilities of decolonial feminist research praxis within such terrain.

Month: Apr   Year: 2009

Month: Oct   Year: 2013