Zoom Workshop: Mnemonic Injustice and the Social Stance on Memory

Zoom Workshop: Affective and Mnemonic Injustice

In recent years, there’s been a growing interest in identifying the different ways in which a person or a group of persons can be a victim of injustice, as well as the psychological/subjective effects that the various types of injustice can have on people’s status as epistemic, affective and mnemonic agents, among others. Following this trend, the purpose of this workshop will be to investigate two distinctive types of injustice as well as their possible conceptual and empirical links: affective and mnemonic injustice.

The first seeks to capture kinds of injustices committed against individuals specifically in their capacities as affective agents, for example, by systematically provoking distressing experiences such as fear, sadness or despair, by manipulating others’ emotions in a way that might prove detrimental to their well-being, or by denying others opportunities to express and regulate their emotional responses. The latter seeks to capture how stereotypes can shape what we remember, so that accounts of fairness and social justice have to be taken into consideration in debates about different kinds of mnemonic capacities. These two kinds of injustices have obvious interconnections, as can be seen, for example, in the way that provoking a traumatic experience upon another person is a kind of injustice that has both an affective and a mnemonic component. We hope that the talks in this workshop, and the discussion that will follow them, will bring out these (and other) philosophical interconnections. As a result, we hope to show that the philosophy of memory and the philosophy of emotion are deeply political subject matters, something that is often overlooked within these disciplines. Far from being a marginal topic, the politics of memory and affectivity is at the heart of questions as to how memory and affective systems function, their purpose, and their role within our social spheres more broadly. We would thus like to invite everyone to join us in discussing and making these topics more visible in the philosophical community.

Programme:

January 31st 2024

3:30 PM (CET): Katherine Puddifoot (Durham): "Mnemonic Injustice and the Social Stance on Memory"

Registration (mandatory): https://forms.gle/k6EoLEjii7hd9RmN7

Abstracts: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eP9bQfSmj9BWnml58N7Zv-n0TM9yN72p/view?usp=sharing

PhilEvents: https://philevents.org/event/show/117621

Organisers: Nathália de Ávila (Universität Wien), Felipe Carvalho (UFLA), Em Walsh (Johns Hopkins)