CHENNAI: The three-day International Memory Studies Conference titled ‘Event,
Memory, Re-Membering: 100 years of Jallianwalla Bagh,’ which has its centenary this year,
began at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) on Wednesday.
Organised by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, the event was inaugurated
on Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary and re-visiting a major event in national history
of freedom struggle.
This is a unique state-of-the-art conference in India, which seeks to create Academia-Artwork-Industry collaboration in the field of Memory Studies, also involving international partners.
This conference is an attempt to enquire into the ways in which Jallianwalla Bagh has been documented/remembered in the last 100 years in various narratives and spaces, both public
and personal.
The conference organizers propose to use Jallianwalla Bagh as a prefatory event to help enter
the complex as well as overlapping discourses on nationalism, historiography, memory, and event.
Prof Mahesh Panchagnula, Dean (International and Alumni Relations), IIT-M and K Padmanabhan, Vice President, TCS, Chennai, inaugurated the conference.
The inaugural session was followed by a talk titled ‘The Future of Memory Studies’ by IIT Madras faculty convenors Dr Merin Simi Raj and Dr Avishek Parui.
In close correspondence with academic presentations from across India as well as from abroad,
IIT Madras, will have exhibition displaying mural artwork stylised by state-of-the-art augmented
reality animation from the XR-Lab of TCS, an IIT-M release said.
Faculty Convenor Dr Avishek Parui, Assistant Professor (English), Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-M said “memory studies is an interdisciplinary field that draws on a range of
research from history, psychology, literature, law, machine studies, and medicine.”
This conference was a dialogic platform for such research which was further accentuated by the Augmented Reality animation on artwork on Jallianwalla Bagh by the XR Lab, TCS Chennai.
“Revisiting a major milestone in our national history through a range of representations and interpretative lenses, this event is the first of a conference series that we are hoping to host
in collaboration with our industry partners that will eventually help in forming a Centre for
Memory Studies at IIT Madras in the not too distant future”, he added.
(agencies)
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