Registration: valerie.rosoux@uclouvain.be
This research seminar brings together two guest speakers :
Julia Spence-Duclos is a PhD researcher in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol, currently undertaking doctoral fieldwork in France. Her research examines the emotional residues and the place of the body in memories of the French-Algerian war of resistance (1954-62). Through walking interviews, she centers emotions and the somatic to understand differently what remains present from this colonial war.
Julia has taught on the undergraduate Politics and International Relations programme at Bristol, including first- and second-year modules (POLI10009, POLI20019). She is the founder of the Memory Research Group, a cross-disciplinary network of postgraduate and early career researchers working on memory, embodiment, and power, and of Speculative Futures, a multilingual, multidisciplinary online publication for PhD students (issue 01 forthcoming December 2026). She also served as a section editor for Making Sense of Racial Identity: Racial Being or Being Racialized? (Brill, 2026).
Presentation
The body as (counter) archive: Analyzing the emotional residues of the French-Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in France.
This research examines embodied memories of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), to explore how the French colonial empire lingers in contemporary France and which emotional residues of the war are still present today. Hegemonic, state-sanctioned narratives of the war privilege Francophone and colonial perspectives, marginalising Algerian, Harki, and anti-imperial voices. In response, the research argues for decentring these official forms of memory-making (material and spatial commemoration, national days, toponyms, and so on) to recognise embodied or felt-memories of war as an alternative reading of war memory-making and of Franco-Algerian postcolonial relations.
The research uses walking interviews as a methodology that positions the body in movement, as a living, breathing archive of knowledge. The body becomes a counter-archive to hegemonic memory: one that resists necropolitical erasure and silencing, and re-centres memories of life and joy. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist epistemologies, it advances embodied memory as a political intervention, understanding the body, memory, and (post)colonial power as interconnected.
By analysing embodied memories of the war, the research shows how somatic and intergenerational remembrance continues to negotiate colonial hierarchies of race, identity, and belonging. Honouring and understanding these memories sheds light on the ways in which contemporary France is haunted by the ghost of its colonial project in Algeria, a haunting made visible through the bodies that carry memories of the war
Natalia Kolyagina is a researcher (CNRS) and a PhD student in Sorbonne University, France. She specializes in Soviet dissident culture, autobiographical writing, and official and unofficial memory in Russia. From 2009 to 2023, she worked for the International Memorial in Moscow. Her PhD dissertation examines the memoirs of women involved in the Soviet dissident human rights movement.
Presentation
Between the Universal and the Personal: Women’s Memoirs of the Soviet Human Rights Movement
In the 1960s - 1980s, a loose network of people emerged in the USSR who opposed state control over private and cultural life. To defend their autonomy, they devised a strategy of appealing to the principle of legality. They held a wide range of political and social views, from orthodox Marxists to liberals, and from nationalists to Zionists and Orthodox Christian activists. They did not seek to overthrow the political system or to form an opposition party. Instead, they demanded that the Soviet state abide by its own laws, its constitution, and fundamental human rights. These dissidents, or rights defenders, circulated uncensored texts in samizdat, documented political repression, staged public demonstrations, launched open letters, and supported political prisoners and their families. Women took part in all of these practices, often on an equal footing with men. They went out into the squares, edited and retyped samizdat periodicals, and sustained the everyday work of the community.
Reading their memoirs specifically as women’s writing is far from straightforward. Most Soviet women’s autobiographies, official and unofficial alike, do not foreground a specifically female experience. The Soviet gender contract proclaimed formal equality: voting rights, access to education and professions, and state support for families. In doing so, it made women’s lives, and the ways they narrated them, different from Western autobiographical traditions, in which a feminist lens had made the personal autobiographical statement often political one. The Soviet civil rights movement itself, grounded in the idea of universal rights, encouraged a similarly universalist way of speaking about oneself. Most life narratives foreground the author’s civic stance and bear witness both to acts of freedom and to persecution by the state. The women authors describe their experience of belonging to the dissident community without viewing it through the lens of gender.
In this talk, I propose a close reading of memoirs by women participants in the dissident movement (focusing on Moscow circles) to explore what lies behind this seemingly universalist view of oneself and others. How do these texts handle the basic categories of life writing: the representation of the self and of the community, and the relationship between private and publicly significant experience? How do they discuss practices of care for political prisoners and their relatives, for members of their own family, and for the community as a whole? How does a female perspective shine through the experience of observing oneself and others? Finally, I will consider the particular role these memoir texts have come to play in constructing and sustaining the memory of the dissident community.
This research seminar brings together two guest speakers :
Aurore Vermylen is a political anthropologist specialised in exile, memory, and political crisis in the Great Lakes region of Africa. She is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow based both at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz (US) and at the Institute of Political Sciences at UCLouvain (Belgium).
Presentation
"Echoing Wars: How Distinct Collective Memories and Intergenerational Frictions Shape the Shifting Political Positions of the Banyamulenge in Eastern DRC?"
Dmitry Kokorin is a sociologist and political scientist. He recently defended his PhD thesis (pending revisions) at the Russia Institute, King’s College London. Dmitry specialises in urban governance, institutional change, the evolution of authoritarian regimes, and post-socialist memory cultures.
Alongside his academic work, Dmitry has substantial experience collaborating with leading organisations in the civil society sector, including International Memorial and several other NGOs and charities.
Presentation
"Studying 'Extended Biographies': A Processual Approach"