About Transformative Memory Network

Some of the key political struggles of our time concern how and what to remembers about mass violence, such as war, genocide, slavery and dispossession. The Transformative Memory Network is a collective of scholars, artists, community-based organizations and policy makers engaged with the broader question of what makes memory transformative of a sense of self, relations to others, legacies of violence, and connections to the land. We seek to change the ways in which memory is conceived, documented and practiced in the context of public policy and scholarship on mass atrocity as a mechanism for dealing with ‘the past.’ Instead, our work reconceptualizes memory as a generative force to challenge the present and reimagine the future.

The methodology of the Network is knowledge exchanges designed to de-centre Western epistemologies and ‘the expert’ and work towards a methodology of relational and reciprocal learning that is place based and embodied.  Located in the territories of–and in dialogue with–memory keepers, the exchanges hasten new ways of thinking about the possibilities of a different future. Exchanges are also facilitated through the Transformative Memory Digital Archive as a virtual means of collaborative knowledge construction and as a repository of records that seek to disrupt silences in dominant narratives of violence and dispossession. 

For more information please contact: ubcsocialjusticegsa@gmail.com ⇉

Bios of organizers

Alejandra Gaviria-Serna works at the intersections of activism, art, scholarship, and policy, related to society’s rights to truth and memory and the Colombian conflict. Since 2006 she is a founder and member of the Colombian Movement H.I.J.O.S (Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence) and MOVICE (Movement of Victims of State Crimes, a movement that brings together 200 organizations in Colombia working for the rights of victims). Between 2009-2016 Alejandra was active in the Memory, Peace and Reconciliation Center of Bogota, the first governmental “museum” on memory as the Coordinator of the Research, Artistic, Communicative and Cultural Actions. She is a political advocacy advisor to the Colombian Network of Places of Memory which coordinates 24 places of memory in Colombia dedicated to the fulfillment of the right to the memory. Until coming to Canada to study the Ph.D., she worked in the recently created Colombian Truth Commission in the areas of Acknowledgement, Recognition, and Coexistence (three of the main goals of the Commission). Alejandra is currently a Ph.D. student in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, where she holds the Vanier Fellowship. In the context of the work and the findings of the Colombian Truth Commission, her research seeks to explore how grassroots initiatives that work creatively and artistically with memory produce shared knowledge and contribute to social comprehension, that enable processes of social reconstruction in diverse instances of mass violence and their aftermath.

David Ng is a PhD student at The Social Justice Institute at UBC. He is a queer, feminist, media artist, and co-founder of Love Intersections, a media arts organization of queer artists of colour. His current research and artistic practices grapple with queer, racialized, and diasporic identity, and how intersectional identities can be expressed through media arts. His interests include imagining new possibilities of how queer racialized artists can use their practice to transform communities. His work has also recently included collaborations with Primary Colours / Couleurs primaires, which is a national initiative to put Indigenous arts practices at the centre of the Canadian art system through the leadership of Indigenous artists, supported by artists of colour.