Anthropology:
Tania Casimiro (Stirling)
Archaeologies of social forgetting: Material memory, care, and urban precarity

https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/j/92577529337?pwd=lQbbmekMORc9xFVirKd8oLRFbAEnZv.1

Abstract: This talk brings social archaeology into direct conversation with debates in memory studies by treating memory not only as a mental capacity, but as a distributed, material, and infrastructural achievement, one that is politically managed and ethically contested. Building from three strands of my research in Portugal, I argue that contemporary material traces make visible the points at which public systems of care and recognition break down, producing what can be called social forgetting. I will discuss evidence of elderly abandonment, approached as an archaeology of absence and deferred responsibility, where mundane objects, domestic arrangements, and institutional residues index ruptures in care; the archaeology of housing-precarity reads the city’s built environment in temporary fixes, informal modifications, eviction scars, and the material choreography of overcrowding, as a memory field shaped by policy and inequality; and finally an inscribed wall where teenagers carved names and marks, examined as a low-authority but persistent archive of belonging, aspiration, and place-claiming. Across these cases, I develop a framework of place-memory under constraint: how remembrance is denied by architecture, property regimes, welfare institutions, and everyday practices of inscription. Methodologically, the talk combines recordings of material evidence with contextual interpretation, ethical reflexivity, and (where possible) community-grounded accounts, to ask a shared question: what obligations arise when archaeology encounters living, vulnerable memories and when refusal, redaction, or co-authorship may be the most responsible form of knowledge production.