The COST Action Slow Memory (2021–2025), led by Jenny Wüstenberg and Joanna Wawrzyniak, brought together 323 scholars from 44 countries to reframe memory studies. Emerging from a critique of event-focused, fast-paced approaches, the project emphasized slow-moving, dispersed, and structural temporalities of memory. Organized into five working groups, it explored industrial decline, welfare transformations, right-wing memory politics, conflict transformation, and environmental memory. The Action produced publications, teaching resources, policy briefs, and a virtual exhibition, while fostering collaborations across disciplines. As it concludes, Slow Memory endures as a conceptual and methodological framework shaping future scholarship and collective practice. In this episode, hosts Annemarie Majlund Jensen, Vjollca Krasniqi and Hanna Teichler look back and take stock. 

We would like to thank our colleagues:

Natalie Braber

Vicky Karaiskou

Libora Oates Indruchova

Sara Dybris McQuaid 

Tea Sindbaek Andersen

Rose Smith

Chris Reynolds 

Yuliya Yurchuk 

Tanja Petrovic

Gruia Badescu 

Deniz Gündogan Ibrisim

Jenny Wüstenberg

Joanna Wawrzyniak

Alice Semedo

Mariana Cerveira Lima

Music: Sleep comes, by Oleksii Kalyna from Pixabay

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The concept of solidarity occupies a central yet contested place in the history of Europe’s labour movements. Frequently invoked by trade unionists across ideological traditions, its meanings have never been singular or fixed. Drawing on life story interviews with retired union activists from several European countries, this podcast – hosted by Joanna Wawrzyniak and Natalie Braber – explores how solidarity is remembered as a lived, evolving practice shaped by the experience of industrial reorganisations. Both hosts bring insights from their collaboration in a broader oral history project on trade union memory in Europe, as part of Working Group 1, "Transformation of Work", of the Slow Memory COST Action.

This podcast features the stories of David Amos, Francka Četković, Mick Chewings, Jan Rulewski, Jean-Claude Reding and Carles Vallejo. We warmly acknowledge the contributions of other interviewers: Nicolas Arendt, Zoé Konsbruck, Brian Rosa, Javier Tébar and Nina Voidopevic. For the full list of project participants, please visit our website. We are deeply grateful to everyone who generously shared their time and experience with us. We would also like thank the University of Warsaw IDUB New Ideas Excellence Initiative and Slow Memory COST Action for supporting this project.

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In this episode, members of working group four examine slow processes of remembering after the Yugoslav wars and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Inspired by their COST Action meetings in Belgrade and Belfast during 2024, co-chairs of the working group, Orli Fridman (Associate Professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications and Professor of the School for International Training, Belgrade) and Chris Reynolds (Professor of European History and Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University, UK) talk to Siobhan Kattago (Associate Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Tartu, Estonia) about their long-standing research on transformations of conflict in Belgrade and Belfast. In addition, Tamara Šmidling, a memory activist with the Centre for Public History, describes how ‘memory walks’ in the streets of Belgrade exemplify slow processes of memory. William Blair, Director of Collections with National Museums NI discusses how museum curators and oral historians work within long durations of time and slow memory. In comparing their experiences of slow memory in the areas of activism, peacebuilding, oral history, memory walks, and the curation of history exhibits, it becomes increasingly clear that transformations of conflict are slow processes that leave unpredictable traces in the present. While reconciliation may often seem elusive, the podcast outlines the different tempos and temporalities of working towards a lasting peace.

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In this episode, we introduce Slow Memory in arts-based practices of care.

The episode features three pioneering arts-based practices from Argentina that generate significant, slow-moving transformations in mental health care. They promote the rights of people who experience mental suffering: the right to play, the right to dream, the right to be listened to, to be remembered. This is key, knowing that the memories of people with lived experiences of mental suffering are oftentimes the object of stigmatization and forgetting in society. The episode includes the voices and stories of people who are involved in this significant memory work, including Santiago Barugel (Hospital Infanto Juvenil Dra. Carolina Tobar García), Sonia Malva Basualdo (Colectivo Crisálida) and Daniel Degol (El cisne del arte). 

Read by: Marileen La Haije

Music by Rasec Música Sin Copyrigth from Pixabay

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In this episode, Members of Working Group 3 on the Transformation of Politics explore the history of International Women’s Day and how this date can be understood as a “slow commemoration”. Slow commemoration refers to dates in our calendar that appear to commemorate or celebrate something specific yet whose meaning is slippery. Slow commemorations attach themselves to multiple histories and multiple meanings: they can be filled with content to persuade you to fight for something, vote for something, or simply buy something. The 8 March is marked in many places in the world, but the meanings attached to it shift and slip according to time and location. Sometimes it is a day to celebrate women in traditional ways with gift-giving and flowers, sometimes it is a day to protest continued inequality, in some places it is viewed as nothing more than a Soviet hangover, and in others, it is a marketing opportunity.

Narrated by Sara Jones and Maija Spurina

Music by Rasec Música Sin Copyrigth from Pixabay

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Susana Gomes da Silva, coordinator of Education at the Modern Art Museum, from the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal; Blerta Hoçia, a curator from the Humanitarian Law Center, based in Kosovo; and Professor Vicky Karaiskou, from the Open University of Cyprus, delve into the meanings of slow curating and what slow curating has entailed in their curatorial work. Against the backdrop of the times of acceleration, they discuss slow curating – as an approach and a method – to critically explore the entanglements of material, affective, and nonhuman worlds. Inquiring into the curatorial domain through the slow memory lens, they pursue an ethical framework challenging representations of the fast-paced and anthropocentric agency.

Read by: 

Vjollca Krasniqi

Isabel Machado Alexandre 

Alice Semedo

Music by Maksym Dudchyk and UNIVERSFIELD from Pixabay

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In this era of rapid acceleration, scholars are subjected to unprecedented pressures to deliver at a pace that is unsustainable. The “boom” in memory studies and memory practice since the 1980s is one expression of this sped-up environment. We operate in systems that require the fulfillment of simultaneous roles of teacher, researcher, administrator, manager, counselor, networker and more. All of these roles are shaped by embeddedness in the regime of neoliberalism in the Anthropocene. Imperatives and deadlines of scholarship are determined by funders, institutional concerns, and administrative checklists, rather than the needs of high-quality, rigorous and engaged research. This is not only detrimental to our health and wellbeing but leads to mediocre research at best and to missing key insights about (slow) memory at worst.

Slow memory conceptualizes practices of remembrance that are ‘multi-sited’, ‘eventless’ and refer to slow-moving phenomena. But we are hampered in our ability to study these processes by a 24-hour news cycle coupled to a 24-hour academic assembly line. To succeed in this system we are expected to work at such a breakneck speed that it seems the only options are to keep the pace at an unsustainable rate or drop out. We believe there is another way that involves slowing down our research methods, processes and thinking. To this end, we propose the Cres Manifesto.

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