Memory Reimagined: Gender and Intersectionality in Participatory Memory Configuration investigates how feminist and decolonial methodologies can transform collective practices of remembrance and repair in contexts affected by prolonged violence and inequality.
The project focuses on collaborative initiatives of memory configuration developed in Bogotá, Colombia, where community members, artists, and cultural organisations engage in creative and participatory processes that respond to the everyday effects of intertwined violences —from armed violence to different forms of structural violences— and seek to reconfigure relations of care, recognition, and belonging.
Through long-term ethnographic research, the project examines how these initiatives articulate collective forms of resistance and recognition that challenge dominant narratives of violence and victimhood. It analyses how gender, class, and coloniality shape experiences of participation and how artistic and dialogical practices—such as walking, storytelling, and collective creation—contribute to transforming social imaginaries and affective relations in urban contexts marked by exclusion.
At the core of the project lies the development of methodological and ethical tools for feminist peace research. One of these is vulnerable listening, a framework that foregrounds affect, reciprocity, and care in research encounters. Building on previous work in the Basque context, the concept has been expanded through the Colombian fieldwork to address the complexities of collaboration in participatory memory processes.
The project also introduced the practice of Derivas—walking-based, situated forms of inquiry inspired by feminist and decolonial thought—which served to explore how memory is produced through embodied, affective, and spatial relations. These methodological innovations advance interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology, peace and conflict studies, and memory studies.
Overall, Memory Reimagined aims to generate both theoretical and practical contributions:
-to demonstrate how participatory memory initiatives can foster relational repair, dialogue, and recognition;
-to provide methodological insights and transferable tools for institutions and organisations working on peacebuilding, cultural production, and memory curation; and
-to inform policy and public debates on how participatory approaches to memory can help reduce gendered and structural forms of violence.
By integrating social sciences and humanities within an applied ethnographic framework, the project contributes to building more reflexive and equitable understandings of memory, justice, and coexistence—linking academic research with community-based transformation.
