The doctoral project is part of the third-party funded project ‘Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe’ (CHAPTER for short) and deals with the question of how memory practices, material spaces and material heritage intertwine in the context of national monuments and commemorative days. Such historical places and dates give various actors the opportunity to imagine community and collectively participate in emotional identification with the nation. Hegemonic politics of memory and commemoration not only include certain members of a community, but also inherently exclude others. The doctoral project examines places of remembrance and commemorative days and monuments, which are instrumentalised by various actors and incorporated into a canon of myths. In doing so, I explore questions such as how actors reinterpret the past in the present in the sense of “nation building”, the role emotions in this process, and how civil society remembrance and state memory politics relate to each other. Methodologically, the study takes a multisited approach and examines the practices of those who commemorate in interaction with the curatorial practices of institutions such as political parties, museums and associations. In a digitalised world, the reinterpretation of heritage also takes place online, and visual aspects play an important role. Accordingly, a second strand of the research is an online ethnography on highly visual social media platforms. The research contributes to the interdisciplinary discussion on dealing with (difficult) heritage.
