| PhD Fellow | |
| Herkunftsinstitution: | European University Institute |
| Zeit am Institut: | 2025, 2026 |
| Förderung: | IEG Stipendium |
| Forschungsthema: | Death and Childhood in the Interactions between the Life Trajectories of Spanish Republicans and Historical Memory Narratives, 1970 – 2022 |
| "My dissertation re-examines the relationship between life story texts and collective public narratives created during the long Spanish movement to fight for pluralistic agency over its historical memory (1970s – 2022). With an emphasis on interacting networks of memory communities within Spain and Spanish exilic communities in France, my analysis centres on the themes of “death” and “childhood”. This focus stems from two key polemics during the movement for historical memory: the exhumation of Republicans buried in mass graves, and the theft or extraction of children from vulnerable mothers. My thesis brings different moments of the historical memory movement into dialogue with each other, through the structure of my chapters and their foci on specific primary sources. I demonstrate how, throughout the historical memory movement, its activists enacted their relationship to Republican memory publicly, and processed their kinship to the dead and stolen in a civic context. In doing this, I contend that they were participants in the redefinition of vital life periods such as death and childhood via the militant production of life-story texts. I conclude that, in an inherently democratic act, they created a form of “civic kinship” with Republican lives, wherein lies one of the major contributions of the historical memory movement to the consolidation of democratic memory. In the context of the post-2022 democratic memory scene where different historically contingent ideas of Spanish democracy interact, my thesis advocates for the expansion of the participant base, by revisiting and re-including the digitally recorded life stories of veteran activists and interviewees from the historical memory movement." |
