IIT Madras organises annual International Memory Studies Conference 2019

 Source:  

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/iit-madras-organises-annual-international-memory-studies-conference-2019/articleshow/71407016.cms

 

Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences is organising an International Memory Studies Conference titled ‘Event, Memory, Re-Membering: One Hundred Years of Jallianwalla Bagh,’ which has its centenary this year, from October 2 to 4, 2019.

Inaugurated on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary and re-visiting a major event in national history of freedom struggle, this is a unique state-of-the-art conference in India, which seeks to create an active academia-artwork-industry collaboration in the field of memory studies, also involving international partners.

This conference is an attempt to enquire into the ways in which Jallianwalla Bagh has been documented/remembered in the last one hundred years in various narratives and spaces, both public and personal. The conference organisers propose to use Jallianwalla Bagh as a prefatory event to help enter the complex as well as overlapping discourses on nationalism, historiography, memory, and event.

Prof Mahesh Panchagnula, Dean (International and Alumni Relations), IIT Madras, and K Padmanabhan, Vice President, TCS, Chennai, inaugurated the conference. The inaugural session was followed by a talk titled, ‘The Future of Memory Studies’ by IIT Madras faculty convenors Dr Merin Simi Raj and Dr Avishek Parui.

In close correspondence with academic presentations from across India as well as from abroad, IIT Madras, will have exhibition displaying mural artwork stylised by state-of-the-art augmented reality animation from the XR-Lab of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Chennai.

Speaking about the significance of this conference, faculty convenor Dr Avishek Parui, Assistant Professor (English), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, said, “Memory Studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws on a range of research from history, psychology, literature, law, machine studies, and medicine. This conference is a dialogic platform for such research which is further accentuated by the Augmented Reality animation on artwork on Jallianwalla Bagh by the XR Lab, TCS Chennai. Revisiting a major milestone in our national history through a range of representations and interpretative lenses, this event is the first of a conference series that we are hoping to host in collaboration with our industry partners that will eventually help in forming a centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras in the not too distant future.”
At this conference, in keeping with the current Cognitive Studies’ preference of examining memory as a process of active re-creation rather than passive recollection, the IIT Madras researchers and their collaborators attempt to virtually recreate the event of Jallianwalla Bagh thereby making history accessible in more experiential terms. The postcard carrying the artwork is attached herewith. The downloadable APP to experience the Augmented Reality animation is as follows: https://bit.ly/2oe5tZR

Highlighting the expected outcomes from this conference, Dr Merin Simi Raj, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, said, “This conference, the first major academia-industry collaboration on Memory Studies in India, will hopefully provide a significant boost to this field of research. The event will showcase a very organic collaboration between humanities scholarship, fine arts, and Machine Studies, and in the process redefine the ways in which Digital Humanities and Memory Studies may be mapped onto each other. We have already been approached by a major publishing house to bring out an edited volume out of this event and we aim to make this into a conference-series that will contribute towards the making of a Memory Studies Centre in our institute.”

Texts and narratives including literature, movies, music, archival material, photographs and monuments, among other material, about such events can serve as potential sites of enquiry in alignment with VR tools. Using Virtual reality (VR) technology as an emotional and evocative medium, alongside other narratives, many interdisciplinary possibilities for research may be opened up under the broad area of Memory Studies. It also, most importantly, seeks to showcase how a violent event from the past with overt imperial/political undertones could be used as a starting point in locating the interstices of literature, memory, empathy and virtual reality.

Papers will be presented on original research, focusing on but not limited to the following broad and related themes: event, nation and narratives, event, memory and archived history, event, nation and forgetting, event, forgetting and forgiving, traumatic and narrative memories, collective memory and hegemonic historical knowledge, nationalist historiography and its limits, imperialism, resistance and re-membering, the politics of producing and consuming history, fact, fabulation and fiction.

The exhibits – artwork on Jallianwalla Bagh animated by Augmented Reality technology by TCS, Chennai – will appear in the IIT Madras campus and will represent a complex contemporary take on the event underlining the interdisciplinary interface of humanities scholarship and cutting-edge technology. This conference will thus bring together academics, artists, and scientists in a direct dialogue depicting contemporary readings and re-tellings of a historic event of national importance. This conference will be the first major event in the institute after the 56th Convocation of IIT Madras where the Prime Minister will arrive as the Chief Guest.

Further details about the event can be accessed from the conference website https://jbmconferenceiitm.wordpress.com