Embedded Memories & Community Imprints


Book Description

How can we change the perspective of our scars from a symbol of trauma to a symbol of healing? Society teaches us that we should hide our scars and conceal their stories but a scar’s visible imprint, or hidden emotional memory, can forever change the way a person sees themselves. Embedded Memories & Community Imprints: The Scars that Live Within Us demonstrates that by choosing to share the stories of our wounds with others through collaborative movement experiences, we can find individual and community healing. People can associate new memories with their “scar story” and develop an alternate aesthetic appreciation for it. This two-pronged project utilizes personal histories as an entry to self-reflection, creativity, empathy, memory, and ultimately, healing. Part 1, Embedded Memories, is a sensory-rich installation illuminated by silk lanterns and lighting pieces worn by the dancers. The creative process of the work began as an investigation of my own scar from ACL reconstructive surgery and continued through an investigation of healing through Japanese philosophies of three specific modalities: Kintsugi, Reiki, and Butoh. Embedded Memories is an amalgamation of this research and the contributions of community members who participate in Part 2, Community Imprints, a tandem creative residency which uses conversation, reflection, and collaborative art making to spark meaningful connections between people. By engaging with our personal histories or “scar stories,” performers, participants, and audience members will have a transformative experience creating new perspectives while acknowledging these experiences as valuable and meaningful parts of us.




Imprints


Book Description

The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians has been a part of Chicago since its founding. In very public expressions of indigeneity, they have refused to hide in plain sight or assimilate. Instead, throughout the city’s history, the Pokagon Potawatomi Indians have openly and aggressively expressed their refusal to be marginalized or forgotten—and in doing so, they have contributed to the fabric and history of the city. Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago examines the ways some Pokagon Potawatomi tribal members have maintained a distinct Native identity, their rejection of assimilation into the mainstream, and their desire for inclusion in the larger contemporary society without forfeiting their “Indianness.” Mindful that contact is never a one-way street, Low also examines the ways in which experiences in Chicago have influenced the Pokagon Potawatomi. Imprints continues the recent scholarship on the urban Indian experience before as well as after World War II.




Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory


Book Description

Jesus and his followers defined their allegiances and expressed their identities in a communications culture that manifested itself in voice and chirographic practices, in oral-scribal interfaces, and in performative activities rooted in memory. In the sixteen essays gathered in Imprints, Voiceprints, and Footprints of Memory, Werner Kelber explores the verbal arts of early Christian word processing operative in a media world that was separated by two millennia from our contemporary media history. The title articulates the fact that the ancient culture of voiced texts, hand-copying, and remembering is chiefly accessible to us in print format and predominantly assimilated from print perspectives. The oral-scribal-memorial-performative paradigm developed in these essays challenges the reigning historical-critical model in biblical scholarship. Notions of tradition, the fixation on the single original saying, the dominant methodology of form criticism, and the heroic labors of the Quest—stalwart features of the historical, documentary paradigm—are all subject to a critical review. A number of essays reach beyond New Testament texts, ranging from the pre-Socratic Gorgias through medieval manuscript culture on to print’s triumphant apotheosis in Gutenberg’s Vulgate, product of the high tech of the fifteenth century, all the way to conflicting commemorations of Auschwitz—taking tentative steps toward a history of media technologies, culture, and cognition of the Christian tradition in the West.




The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place


Book Description

This Handbook explores the latest cross-disciplinary research on the inter-relationship between memory studies, place, and identity. In the works of dynamic memory, there is room for multiple stories, versions of the past and place understandings, and often resistance to mainstream narratives. Places may live on long after their physical destruction. This collection provides insights into the significant and diverse role memory plays in our understanding of the world around us, in a variety of spaces and temporalities, and through a variety of disciplinary and professional lenses. Many of the chapters in this Handbook explore place-making, its significance in everyday lives, and its loss. Processes of displacement, where people’s place attachments are violently torn asunder, are also considered. Ranging from oral history to forensic anthropology, from folklore studies to cultural geographies and beyond, the chapters in this Handbook reveal multiple and often unexpected facets of the fascinating relationship between place and memory, from the individual to the collective. This is a multi- and intra-disciplinary collection of the latest, most influential approaches to the interwoven and dynamic issues of place and memory. It will be of great use to researchers and academics working across Geography, Tourism, Heritage, Anthropology, Memory Studies, and Archaeology.




To Commit to Memory


Book Description




Front Lines of Community


Book Description

Based on the premise that a society’s sense of commonality depends upon media practices, this study examines how Hollywood responded to the crisis of democracy during the Second World War by creating a new genre - the war film. Developing an affective theory of genre cinema, the study’s focus on the sense of commonality offers a new characterization of the relationship between politics and poetics. It shows how the diverse ramifications of genre poetics can be explored as a network of experiental modalities that make history graspable as a continuous process of delineating the limits of community.




Imprint


Book Description




Imprint


Book Description

Imprint is a profound and courageous exploration of trauma, family, and the importance of breaking silence and telling stories. This book is a fresh and startling combination of history and personal revelation. When her son almost died at birth and her grandmother passed away, something inside of Claire Sicherman snapped. Her body, which had always felt weighed down by unknown hurt, suddenly suffered from chronic health conditions, and her heart felt cleaved in two. Her grief was so large it seemed to encompass more than her own lifetime, and she became determined to find out why. Sicherman grew up reading Anne Frank and watching Schindler's List with almost no knowledge of the Holocaust's impact on her specific family. Though most of her ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust, Sicherman's grandparents didn't talk about their trauma and her mother grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia completely unaware she was even Jewish. Now a mother herself, Sicherman uses vignettes, epistolary style, and other unconventional forms to explore the intergenerational transmission of trauma, about the fact that genes can be altered and carry memories, which are then passed down--a genetic imprinting. With astounding grace and strength, Sicherman weaves together a story that not only honours her ancestors but offers the truth to the next generation and her now nine-year-old son. A testimony of the connections between mind and body, the past and the present, Imprint is devastatingly beautiful--ultimately a story of love and survival.




Challenging Ideas


Book Description

Challenging Ideas is a selection of articles which address the intersections between theory and empirical research. In general, the contributions to the volume focus on how imaginations of the temporal relationship between past and present might inform theory as well as empirical research. It is divided into two parts, the first of which, Memory, looks at the memory turn in the discipline of history, and includes investigations into the relationship between past and present in the working through of trauma and reflections on the relationship between media memory, collective memory and trauma. The second part of the volume, History looks at the intersections between social science, political theory and the writing of history. This section includes reflections on how the historian’s archival work might inform the construction of social and political theory and explorations of the temporal relationship between past and present at work in the archives. The contributions to this volume encourage historically oriented scholars to approach their work with an active interest in disciplines close to their topic and a reflexive attentiveness to the broader power relations within which they work. They offer different perspectives on the intrinsic relationship between past and present at work in the interactions between theory and empirical research, and thereby give impetus to challenging ideas and to the challenging of ideas in the social sciences and in the humanities.




My Dance with Justice


Book Description

I love God and I know he loves me, so why can't I move beyond my past? Many have psychological fractures due to abuse and trauma that can cause conflicts between what they know is true about God and their lived experience. This book explores the importance of psychological justice by delving into the author's multiple encounters with death, grief, trauma, betrayal, sickness, and abuse. Walk with her and draw out the theological and psychological ways God has passionately brought psychological justice to her life. Tracing the threads of one's story can open a door of hope leading to a deeper and more congruent grace-filled walk with God the Father, our wonderful Savior Jesus, and the ever-present Holy Spirit. The author's prayer is that her vulnerability might give readers courage to find their own voice and begin to map out their own story.