In search of consent: Agency, audience and identity in memory activism

Abstract

The article presents a public history practitioner’s perspective on memory activism, critically engaging with the experiences and lessons learned in the implementation of two public history projects in Sri Lanka – the Herstories Project and the Community Memorialisation Project. It draws on personal reflections and observations made while returning to some of the women participants to renew their consent for a new public iteration of their narratives, nearly a decade after first documenting their histories. It examines some of the conceptual and practical questions that emerged while implementing memory projects with the ‘public’ purposes of peacebuilding and transitional justice outcomes. Through six vignettes, it explores the complicated nature of ‘consent’ through the lens of agency, identity and the construction of victimhood. I argue that memory initiatives need to be cognisant of how power asymmetries and ‘macro-narratives’ frame how stories are told, to whom, and for what purpose, and that when consent is given, it is not given in perpetuity.