Overview

This online laboratory examines how armed conflict is remembered through a gendered lens, shifting attention away from dominant narratives centered on combat, heroism, and spectacular violence. Instead, it focuses on what remains in the background: the everyday practices that sustain life under violence, the invisible labor of survival, and the forms of memory that remain unrecognized or excluded from official narratives.

Rather than treating memory as a representation of the past, the course approaches it as a lived and ongoing condition, structured by waiting, uncertainty, and unresolved loss. Drawing on feminist memory studies, the anthropology of the everyday, and the instructor’s doctoral and continuing research on women partners of guerrillas in the Kurdish conflict, the course develops conceptual and analytical tools to examine how memory is produced, silenced, and contested.

The course adopts a thematic and comparative approach, examining how similar memory processes — disappearance, waiting, silence, survival — emerge across different contexts (including Latin America, the post-Yugoslav space, and post-conflict settings), rather than organizing the course by region. Designed as an interactive online laboratory, it prioritizes collaborative inquiry, iterative analysis, and collective knowledge production, explicitly connecting teaching and research by involving participants in materials related to the instructor’s research trajectory.