Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Post-Doc, Institut fuer Sozialwissenschaften

About

I am a sociologist interested in political and cultural change. My fields of interest are German memory politics, mediated memory, sociology of culture, urban sociology, critical theory and ethnography. I study the relations between narrative construction, activism and the urban public sphere.


I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Germany, in and around the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin at the year of its opening (2005-6), of which I based my dissertation “Public Passages: Political Action in and around the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin” (2008) and following articles.

I am currently writing a book, provisionally titled Spheres of Speakability: Experience at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, focusing on the Holocaust Memorial as a case study in the relation between political transformation and memory work that takes place in the new memorial quarter in the center of Berlin. In studying visitors’ activity at the memorial, I present how the Memorial creates a sphere in which one’s competence in knowing about the past and “facing” it emotionally are productive mechanisms for the engagement with moral and political standing in the present. This is achieved, I argue, through “the rule of experience” or the norms for the organization and framing of action in the site, crystallized in the indefinite call to undergo transformation vis-à-vis memory of the Holocaust. Through this form of engagement, I suggest, a new performative space is created, where one should present, document and discuss their feelings and thoughts, which the place provokes, in relation to other sites of Holocaust memory and their experience.
My research looks into the ways the Holocaust memorial experience is mediated by interactive media, and asks whether the various media of new archives, databases, audio and visual materials create new forms of engagement with the past. I show how, when looking at the ways memory of the Holocaust is presented and searched, one can see the shift from intergenerational transmission of knowledge of the past and its affects, to mediation of the experience of memory, with the primary focus on emotions and emotional transformation.
Finally, I observe the ways action in and around the Memorial changed since 2005-6, and find, through ethnographic work at the Memorial in 2010-11 in guided tours and workshops, that visitors reflect more on human rights, racism and minority inequality. I ask how the memorial project’s other “others” through the various practices developed in it in relations to the two new ones in its vicinity (the Memorial for the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist regime and the Memorial to the Murdered Sinti and Roma). This newly developed act of wandering in a public space of memory, is studied within the scope of European integration and the changing concepts and significance of citizenship and democracy.