Democratic Memories in Global Perspective

Democracy as an ideal form of government was interpreted and realized differently across time in various parts of the world. Every attempt to establish democratic institutions in countries or world regions, their relative success, forms of organization and basis of stability, as well as the threats against them, are part of a global democratic history, which connects interpretations of the past with present experiences and future aspirations. 

Memory is a crucial tool for reflecting on democracy, as it involves many different representations of the past, cultures of remembrance and memory sites in museums, memorials and archives. Not only does it awake moral emotions across generations, influencing political and rule making decisions, but it also allows people to think about the past, present and future together. Democracy is remembered, memory affects democracy and, moreover, memories can be made, shared and reflected upon democratically, with an awareness of the variety of perspectives both in space and over time.

In this course, the topic of democratic memories will be discussed in an international and transdisciplinary way, including history, law, political science, education, psychology, sociology, archaeology and cultural studies.

This course aims to make students aware that democratic memory issues do not have simple solutions and demand cooperation between different academic specializations and multiple stakeholders, so that they appreciate how these issues are both contextually embedded and invite comparison as well as interdisciplinary study. 

The contact with researchers and students from different countries where issues of memory and democracy are dealt with differently, will support the development of critical thinking, opening new possibilities for mutual understanding, conceiving of international agreements as well as European and global collaborations.

The course brings lecturers and students together around concrete memory issues, visiting local memory sites and inviting the comparison between familiar and less familiar memories, between familiar and less familiar perspectives. Students are involved as actors and contributors in memory work, by elaborating their own small research projects in international groups under the supervision of our interdisciplinary team of teachers.

1. The dynamics of memory: transitional processes in society and in the transformative process in educating and learning about the past.
2. Anti-colonial, postcolonial and de-colonial processes affecting memory, including the relationship between former colonial powers and the independent countries, as well as the memories of colonialism.
3. Memories of recent political conflict and totalitarianism, group-based moral emotions across generations, and the current shaping of democracy.

These topics will be approached from the angles of:

• history and philosophy of law as well as international law and political sciences; 
• recent, public and cultural history, as well as archaeology, comparing different contexts dealing with heritage and the various interpretations around it; 
• the fields of history and civic education, working towards the inclusion of multiple perspectives in historical understanding;
• social and cultural studies that aim to shed intercultural perspectives on memory across the Mediterranean, as well as the Atlantic.

Students will acquire critical knowledge on historical/ collective memory from the perspective of different disciplines. They will develop critical thinking on how memory can be democratized, reflecting on its main challenges and solutions. 

This practically involves acquiring skills for participating in transdisciplinary debates on memory and their relationship with concrete issues faced by museums, memorials, archives and other memory sites. As well as methodological skills for collecting and analyzing different kinds of data pertinent to the interdisciplinary study of memory. And, crucially, skills for working in international teams to solve common problems in relation to memory research.

The physical mobility part will be running between 8-12 February 2027, in Madrid.

The 30 hour program consists of an opening conference, 5 lectures, a round-table discussion, an Open Lab workshop and 4 sessions of student group-work, where they will be tutored by our transdisciplinary team of lecturers.

This will be complemented by: 

• an expert-guided visit to urban neighborhood of Tetuán, where traces of Spanish colonialism in northern Morocco can be found; 
• a related short visit to Casa Árabe, a cultural center of reference for the diffusion of Arabic culture in Spain; 
• an expert-guided visit to Madrid city center exploring the material traces of Spanish colonialism in the Americas; 
• an expert-guided fieldtrip to Madrid's Sierra de Guadarrama, where the students will visit the Bustarviejo archeological site and the Cuelgamuros monument, both bearing powerful witness to Spain's recent past of political conflict.

The virtual part will be running between 1 December 2026 - 31 March 2027.

The online sessions will introduce the students to the transdisciplinary field of memory studies and problematize the relation between memory and democracy. The three course themes - Changing Memories, Memory and Coloniality and Memory and Political Conflict - will be introduced. The students will become more familiar with sociopsychological, political and legal philosophical issues in memory, as well as the research methods used in these fields: interviews, surveys, discourse analysis. Finally, they will receive a group tutoring session, to orient them on the small research project they will develop during the week in Madrid.

Virtual sessions: Wednesdays, 18:00-20:00

• 2 December: Floor van Alphen and Laura Beck (UAM) - CIVIS Course presentation. Lecture: ‘Introduction to Memory Studies as a transdisciplinary field: Changing Narratives.’
• 9 December: Konstantinos Kornetis (Department Modern History, UAM, member of ‘Comisionado 50 Años de Libertad’). Lecture: ‘Memory and Transitional Processes in Comparative Perspective’
• 16 December: Laurent Licata (Centre for Social and Cultural Psychology, ULB). Lecture: ‘Social psychological approaches to collective memories of colonialism’

- Winter Break -

• 13 January: César López (Psychology, UAM). Lecture: ‘Interrogating national narratives about the troubled colonial past in Spain’
• 20 January: Irene Martín Cortés (Political Sciences, UAM). Lecture: ‘Public opinion and memories of conflicts of the past’
• 27 January: Cristina Sánchez (Philosophy of Law, UAM). Lecture: ‘Holocaust, evil and collective responsibility’
• 3 February: group tutoring session, orientating the students on possible research subjects and methods with our interdisciplinary CIVIS team of teachers.

- 8 - 12 February: Physical mobility week in Madrid -

- 17 February: independent group work (no session)

• 24 February: Floor van Alphen and Laura Beck (UAM): Student’s paper presentations/ Follow-up session. The other lecturers of the course are invited to attend.
• 3 March: Floor van Alphen and Laura Beck (UAM): Student’s paper presentations/ Follow-up and final session of the course.
  

In order to receive the certificate of attendance and the 3 ECTS credits related to this course, students are required to undertake the following mandatory activities:

• attend at least 75% of the lessons during the virtual phase;
• attend at least 75% of the lessons during the physical phase;
• elaborate a small research project to be submitted at the end of the virtual phase;

• present the results of the research projects at the end of the virtual phase.

Motivation Letter

CV

Students will be selected based on their motivation letter (max. 1 page – around 500 words) convincingly demonstrating their interest in the topic, attested through the following aspects (each one counts one point):

• personal engagement in civil society organizations linked to democratic collective memories issues, 
• attendance to courses on democratic collective memories,
• attendance to conferences on democratic collective memories
• own research (including Bachelor or Master thesis),
• future academic/ professional perspectives.

A level B2 certification in English and any documents proving the students' interest in the topic are positively evaluated. 

Fadma Ait Mous is Professor of Sociology at Aïn Chock Faculty of Letters and the Humanities at Hassan II University of Casablanca (H2UC), director of the Confucius Institute and "Chargée de mission" on developing research on Social Sciences and Humanities. She is also a Researcher and joint Director of the Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Différenciations Socio Anthropologiques et les Identités Sociales (LADSIS). Among her many professional affiliations, she’s General Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (Beyrouth), Member of the Executive Council of the Merian Center for Advanced Study in the Maghreb (MECAM, Tunis); Fellow of TALIM, Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies and Founding Member of Fatima Mernissi Chair. Her research is mainly focused on issues related to nationalism and social movements, gender and socio-political transformations, history and memory, youth cultures, social media and migration. She has co-edited Le Métier d’intellectual (2014), awarded the Atlas Prize for Essays in 2015, and Les jeunes du Maroc: Comprendre les dynamiques pour un nouveau contrat social (2021), which analyze social contract dynamics through engagement with youth voices.

Floor van Alphen is Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She received her doctorate in Development, Learning and Education at the same university in 2015. From 2012 to 2018 she investigated the appropriation of master narratives among high-school students in Argentina, with scholarships from the Argentine National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). Currently, her research focuses on collective memory, addressing students’ cultural diversity and their manifold constructions of the past. She is Principal Investigator of the interdisciplinary project “Beyond the Spanish Master Narrative: Dominant and Alternative Collective Memories Among Transcultural Youth” (SI4/PJI/2024-00157) funded by the Comunidad de Madrid.

Laura Beck Varela is Associate Professor of History of Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has collaborated with the CIVIS Microprogram 'Global Awareness', coordinated by the University of Tübingen. She has been visiting professor and researcher at the universities of Toulouse, Vienna, Max-Planck Institut for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt am Main), Nova de Lisboa, Federal de Pernambuco (Brazil), among others. She has worked and published on the history of property law, constitutional history, women's history, history of legal education; and is interested in the role of democratic memory in legal education.

Ignacio Brescó de Luna is Associate Professor at the University of Distance Education (UNED, Spain) and external researcher at the Aalborg University Centre for Cultural Psychology (Denmark), where he was postdoc researcher and Associate Professor until 2021. He visited Cambridge University (UK), University of Brasilia (Brazil), the Georg Eckert Institut (Germany) and Kyushu University (Japan) for his research, centering on collective memory, national identity, grief and the experience of memorial sites. He edited the books: The Road to Actualized Democracy (2018), Memory in the Wild (2020), Remembering as a Cultural Process (2019). In 2020 he received the Grífols Foundation bio-ethic grant.

Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has been a visiting professor at Saint Joseph University (Beirut) and at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London University). He is chief editor of the Memories of the Mediterranean collection at Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo. He has translated works such as Duniazad by the Egyptian writer May Tilmisani, and Morning Thoughts by the Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui. He has published in journals such as Journal of Arabic Literature, Al-Andalus/Magreb, Middle Eastern Literatures, Journal of North African Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Arab Studies Journal or Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.

María García Casas is Lecturer in Public International Law and previously held several positions as a researcher in think tanks. PhD in Public International Law and Master's degree in International Relations. She has focused on international customary obligations in Transitional Justice processes (El Derecho internacional de la justicia transicional: la construcción del marco normativo de las transiciones, Wolters Kluwer, 2021). Moreover, she has studied the criminalization of unconstitutional changes of government in the African system (publication in the Journal of International Criminal Justice, 2021), the extraterritorial application of the European Convention of Human Rights, indigenous peoples’ rights under the Inter-American Human Rights System, and the current understanding of Ius ad bellum, among others.

Ana González Navarro is Assistant Professor at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has been a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sapienza Università di Roma with the project “Reconstructing social memory through Moroccan women's writing: female prison literature between the 1970's and the 2010's” (RESOMFEM). She is collaborating on research projects at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad de Sevilla. She has presented her research at conferences and has published “From Khanata Bennouna to Leila Slimani: Moroccan Women Writers from the Margins to World Literature” (2019, with Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla), “Moroccan Women Critics in the Wilderness. New Tools for Literary Criticism?” (2021), and “Between the cult for femininity and feminist claims: women’s journals in Morocco in the second half of the 20th century” (2024). Her research interests focus on Moroccan contemporary literature from a postcolonial perspective and on cultural expressions by women and feminist discourses in Arab contexts.

Marisa González de Oleaga is Professor of the Department of Social History and Political Thought at the University of Distance Education (UNED), Spain. Her career has combined research and teaching. She was visiting professor at Colegio de México and Colegio Mexiquense (Mexico), Universidad Nacional de Asunción (Paraguay), Universidad General Sarmiento and Universidad de La Pampa (Argentina). Among her publications are: El doble juego de la hispanidad (2001); El hilo rojo. Palabras y prácticas de la utopía en América Latina (2006); En primera persona. Testimonios desde la utopía (2013); Transterradas. El exilio infantil y juvenil como lugar de memoria (2019); Itinerarios. Historiografía y posmodernidad (2019); El Silencio. La dictadura en el Delta (2024). She has coordinated six research projects, of which the most recent is "Territories of Memory: other cultures, other sp between Spain and Latin America in the 19th and 20th century."

Vangelis Karamanolakis is Professor in Theory and History of Historiography at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). He is also President of the Historical Archive (NKUA) and President of the Society’s Board of Directors of the Contemporary Social History Archives. He has taught at the universities of Crete, Athens, Panteion (Greece). He has published several books and articles about theory of history, Greek historiography, memory studies, history of dictatorship (1967-1974), history of institutions, archival research and psychiatric institutions. His last book is about the destruction of the files of social convictions in Greece (2019).

Kostis Kornetis is Assistant Professor in Contemporary History (UAM). He is a former member of ‘Comisionado 50 Años de Libertad’, Spanish Government, Ministerio de Política Territorial y Memoria Democrática, and has worked in different research projects related to democratic memory, such as “Polarization about historical memory in Spain: Distribution and factors that contribute to its intensification” (2017-2019), or the Oral History project “Memories of the Occupation in Greece”, funded by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the “Memory, Responsibility and Future” Foundation (EVZ), and Freie Universität Berlin. He has authored, among others, 'Rethinking democratisation in Spain, Greece and Portugal' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) (coedited with M. E. Cavallaro).

Dimitra Lampropoulou is Assistant Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of History and Archaeology. Her research and teaching interests concern social and cultural history, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, youth, work, welfare, voluntary action, social movements and memory. She has published books and articles on twentieth century Greek social history and oral history. She is a member of the Contemporary Social History Archives (Athens), the Association of Oral History in Greece, the Cultural and Intellectual History Society (Athens), the European Labour History Network and the research network “Who Cares in Europe?” Cost Action 18119. Her most recent publications include Mobilizing for Welfare in Europe. The Unpolitical Politics of Social Action, 1870s-1990s. A Document Reader (co-edited with Efi Avdela, Clarisse Berthezène, Laura Lee Downs and Dominika Gruziel); Gendering the Mixed Economies of Welfare: Ruptures and Trajectories in Postwar Europe (Co-edited with Efi Avdela and Lindsey Earner-Byrne. Historein 21/2); Gender and Anticommunism in Children’s Social Protection in Postwar Greece: The Role of Royal Foundations (with Efi Avdela, Historein, 21/2).

Laurent Licata is Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His current research interests are (1) the interplay between collective memories (or social representations of history), social identities and intergroup relation processes, with a focus on colonialism and collective victimhood, and 2) acculturation processes of people with immigrant background. He chaired the COST Action IS1205 «Social psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Union» (2012-2016). Currently, he participates in the Horizon Europe project CONCILIARE - Confidently changing colonial heritage and co-chairs a research and development project on the restitution of colonial collections of cultural objects and human remains, in collaboration with the University of Lubumbashi.

Cesar Lopez is Associate Professor in the Department of Basic Psychology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain). He earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at the same university (2012). He has been a visiting scholar at several universities in the United States (Harvard University, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston) and Europe (Institute of Education, London, and Erasmus University Rotterdam). His main research interests are collective memory and identity, narrative thinking, collective emotions, historical thinking, and history learning in schools and popular culture.

Misael Arturo López Zapico is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern History at the Autonomous University of Madrid. As a historian specializing in the twentieth century, his research focuses on analyzing international politics in the Atlantic world, with a particular interest in Spain–US relations. He also incorporates Latin America, especially Chile, into his work. He is also interested in the history of the press and propaganda during the Franco regime and the Spanish transition to democracy as well as member of the AECID's Memory, Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution Network.

Irene Martín Cortés teaches Political Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She was coordinator at UAM of the Horizon Project H2020 “REPAST – Revisiting the Past, Anticipating the Future – Strengthening European Integration through the Analysis of Conflict Discourses” (2018-2021). Recently, she has also coordinated the research project “Polarization around historical memory in Spain: distribution and factors that affect its intensification” (2021-2024), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Her research interests are, amongst others, the presence of the past in nowadays politics, and political culture and participation in Spain and Greece. She is coauthor of Martín, I., Paradés, M., & Zagórski, P. (2023). How the traumatic past influences the vote of the populist radical right parties in Germany, Poland, and Spain. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 31(2), 332-344.

Glaucia Peres da Silva is sociologist, specialized in globalization and cross-border processes. Her PhD in economic sociology focused on the formation of global markets, analyzing the case of the world music market. At the University of Tübingen, she is responsible for the development of the Global Awareness Education with focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The focus of her work is the inter- and transdisciplinary teaching on globalization, international networking and development of transfer projects.

Everardo Perez-Manjarrez is a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in the Department of Contemporary History at the school of Geography and History, UNED (Spain), and a Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research centers on the historical analysis of the colonization of the Americas, and the socio-educational implications of colonial legacies in Spain and Latin America. His work engages critically with how cultural institutions negotiate memory, power, and historical responsibility in contemporary societies. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Clark University, and University of California, Santa Cruz in the US, as well as at FLACSO in Argentina and Seoul National University in South Korea. Among his most recent publications are Antimonumentos: nuevas prácticas en la disputa por la memoria (2025); Global Perspectives on the Role of Dialogue in History Education (co-edited, Routledge, 2025); Descolonizar es una ruta y no un punto de llegada: El museo Peabody de Arqueología y Etnología (2024); and Historical Reenactment: New Ways of Experiencing History (co-edited, Berghahn, 2022). As a member of The Open Canopy (Project Zero/Harvard), he leads the Remembering the Past? initiative, collaborating with more than 5,800 students across 23 countries. This project has achieved significant uptake in Latin American schools, contributing to innovative, dialogic approaches to historical understanding and civic education.

Javier Salido Domínguez is a Professor of Archaeology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He has been a visiting scholar at prestigious institutions such as the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) in Frankfurt in 2011, the Institute of Archaeology (University of Oxford) in 2008, 2009, and 2011, and the CSIC–Spanish School of History and Archaeology in Rome (EEHAR) in 2006 and 2007. A member and collaborator in numerous prestigious national and international research projects, he leads the UAM research group “AGERHISP: Landscape, Territory and Economic Resources of the Central Iberian Peninsula in the Roman and Medieval Periods.” Through the Open Lab ARCHEOPENLAB Archaeological Citizen Science Project and seven knowledge-transfer projects directed by Javier Salido Domínguez, various strategic initiatives have been carried out to raise public awareness about the importance of cultural heritage. This perspective understands heritage not only as material assets—such as monuments and artifacts—but also as traditions, customs, knowledge, and stories that shape local identity.

Cristina Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy of Law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, known for being among the first to publish on Hannah Arendt in Spanish. She has worked on the problem of contemporary evil and the Holocaust, authoring books including Cartografías del mal, Plaza y Valdés (2017) and Confrontando el mal, Siglo del Hombre (2018). In recent years, she has worked on evil from a gender perspective; mass violence, specifically sexual violence, against women in wars, collaborating with researchers from Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Germany and Croatia. Her latest publications are Violencias de género: Entre la guerra y la paz (2021) and La agenda de Mujer, paz y seguridad (2022).

Lukas Werther did his PhD and his Habilitation in Archaeology at Jena University. After a research stay at University College London, he worked as Visiting Professor at Tübingen University, where his is still affiliated and teaching. Currently, he is Deputy Director of the Romano Germanic Commission within the German Archaeological Institute. He is a historical archaeologist with a focus on social inequality, historic environments and landscapes, including landscapes of terror and violence. Among his recent publications is Nazi shale oil and forced labour. Interpreting surface finds from a shale oil plant of „Unternehmen Wüste“ (1944/45) in Wurttemberg, Germany. In: Beiträge zur Mittelalterarchäologie in Österreich. Beiheft 15 (2024).