Introduction: From dialogicity in memory to dialogic remembering

This special issue is dedicated to dialogicity in memory, with a focus on vernacular and mediated memories. It empirically and theoretically examines dialogic processes in mnemonic practices, proposing a novel method for understanding and activating relationality in the course of sharing memories in groups. We have called this method “dialogic remembering.”

The idea of theorizing practices of dialogue beyond the many existing uses of this notion in memory studies emerged from our empirical research into the processes of remembering East European postsocialist transformations (or “transitions” ¹ ). Our project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980s and 1990s on Local and Transnational Scales” (2021–2024) ² focused on how such remembering, conducted in small groups of participants with diverse (gender, generational, professional, and other) backgrounds in Germany and Poland, can involve relating to others’ and to one’s own memories despite differences in experience or even disagreements in interpretations of the past, and through reflection on one’s habitual recourse to prevalent mnemonic narratives. During this research, we realized that the existing conceptions of dialogue in memory did not do justice to the processes we were observing, and that these processes therefore required further theorization.

Perhaps most commonly, notions of dialogue have been employed in human rights-oriented memory practices that aim at reconciliation in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. The idea behind these practices is to develop shared narratives about the past and visions of the future by bracketing differences in order to generate common belonging to a social group (typically, a nation). Aimed at producing tolerance, forgiveness, and mutual understanding, such deployments of “dialogue,” however, frequently result in growing resentment and lack of sensitivity regarding the impact of the past on the present as well as in nationalist and other exclusionary practices (David, 2020; Gensburger and Lefranc, 2020; Mink, 2008). Furthermore, reconciliation efforts facilitated by tokenistic dialogue tend to erase the past of the emancipatory struggles that do not fit into new ideologies of nation-building and to silence dissent in the present (Grunebaum, 2011; Kirn, 2022; Litvinenko and Zavadski, 2020; Malinova, 2021).

This special issue approaches dialogue beyond facile moralization and political instrumentalization, exploring social and cultural practices that allow for sharing varying memories, voicing difference and dissent, relating to stories of others, and potentially creating new narratives that interlink divergent visions of the past. Viewed from (new) materialist perspectives, incorporating actor-network theory approaches, dialogue is a common occurrence because all (extra-)discursive interactions, including mnemonic ones, are rooted in attachments, resonances, and the ability to respond (Bakhtin, 1981; Echerhoff, 2010; Felski, 2016; Latour, 2007). In other words, dialogue is not an option—it is a reality.

However, the potential of dialogue can be radicalized by turning to its emancipatory possibilities: through radical listening, speaking back, stepping outside one’s own perspective, and other strategies. We can thus nuance our understanding of dialogue by purposefully seeing grounds for and processes of it—sometimes deactivated, suppressed, erased, or foreclosed—where they are usually not seen.

Some concepts developed in memory studies—first and foremost, “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg, 2009) and “agonistic memory” (Cento Bull and Hansen, 2016)—are helpful for thinking about dialogue in non-essentialist and critical ways. In particular, the concept of multidirectional memory highlights the possibilities of holding together and interrelating memories of different atrocities (e.g., of the Holocaust and slavery) and generating “differential solidarities” (Rothberg, 2011). Agonistic memory, in turn, suggests how the presence of radically different memories of the same past within a public sphere can lead to re-politicizing engagements with that past. However, the agonistic approach presupposes the existence of fully fledged and coherent perspectives on the events in question that are promoted by specific mnemonic actors and are supported/shared by particular publics.

These concepts and approaches turn out to be less applicable to contexts in which group memories of a past are still in formation, are very fragmented and ambiguous, or include silenced and suppressed perspectives. They are also not as helpful for recognizing the co-existence of and relations between different perspectives within collective and individual memories of an event or fragment of the past. For instance, even one individual memory might involve contradictory interpretations, some of them more actively recalled and others dormant or suppressed; encounters with memories that activate those downplayed and peripheral perspectives may create dialogue between and within individual memories.

At the heart of what we call “dialogic remembering” is not the productivity of disagreement in memory (that is, a non-consensually dialogical exchange of radically different perspectives on the past, which characterizes the agonistic approach). Rather, dialogic remembering centers relationality as another aspect of dialogue (and of disagreement too), one that presupposes “the possibility of non-binary distribution of difference: a plurality of positions that converse, question, override, or support each other—that is, a plurality that involves relations of diverse types” (Robbe et al., 2026 [2025]: 4, original emphasis). In other words, in contrast to the focus of agonistic memory on creating frameworks for the articulation of radically different perspectives (“agreeing to disagree”), the dialogic remembering approach seeks to identify and conceptualize the practices and politics of relation across differences—through, for instance, affective resonances, gestures of reciprocity, or radical listening (Siry et al., 2016). We refer to this kind of dialogical relationality as “relationality-in-conflict” (Robbe et al., 2026 [2025]).

This special issue seeks to contribute to theorizing dialogicity in memory by viewing dialogue not as an ideal, a metaphor, or a normative assumption (cf. Assmann, 2015), but as a process that takes place—in a variety of ways and on different levels—within social and cultural practices involving individuals and groups. Seeing and understanding such processes particularly within mnemonic communities or textual practices requires a well-calibrated optic that allows for studying contradictions within and between different memories as well as connections and convergencies. For elaborating this perspective, we draw on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogue as denoting interactions between discordant perspectives and experiences which may take the form of contestation as well as partial agreement or mutual change while preserving structures of “dissensus” (Rancière, 2010). Furthermore, this issue is committed to examining the mnemonic aspects of the “dialogics of the oppressed” (Hitchcock, 1992; Robbe, 2015): the contributions focus predominantly on bottom-up processes of querying and contesting hegemonic narratives through everyday memories, emerging artistic voices, or marginalized groups and oppositional social movements.

To sum up, dialogic remembering develops an optic that can

All articles of this special issue are based on empirical research and contribute to theorizing dialogic remembering from different (inter)disciplinary and methodological perspectives in the humanities and social sciences. They consider dialogic remembering in vernacular and mediated practices.

In addition to further theorizing dialogic remembering, also with regard to extant writing on dialogicity and relationality as well as to relevant concepts in memory studies, our own article for this issue grounds our method of remembrance in empirical research on memories of the 1980s–1990s postsocialist “transitions.” We carried this research out in the Polish cities of Gdańsk and Łódź as well as the German cities of Berlin and Eisenhüttenstadt, conducting small-group workshops with citizens of these cities and analyzing the processes of dialectical dis/agreement that occurred during them. Recounting the details of our method of remembrance, the contribution goes on to identify several types of dialogic remembering practices and to reflect on their actual and potential effects.

Two further contributions to this issue, by Mihai Iovănel and Andreea Mironescu (2026) and by Gruia Badescu (2026), deal with memories of postsocialist transformations—both in the context of Romania. Iovănel and Mironescu analyze Romanian (post-)transitional poetry from the perspective of its dialogic practices and potentialities. Building on Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) theorization of discursive dialogism as well as post-Bakhtinian writings arguing that poetry was not necessarily “monological” (p. 285), the authors employ this issue’s key notion of dialogic remembering to examine how autobiographical poetic discourse can enact and stimulate memories and mnemonic solidarities in national and transnational frameworks. “Romanian post-transitional poetry,” according to Iovănel and Mironescu, “offers a way to transcend national geography, gender, race, and autobiographical memory by linking different political contexts and social experiences intertextually and mnemonically.”

Gruia Badescu, in turn, discusses a series of memory workshops that took place in local libraries in rural Romania and that engaged its participants in dialogue about the significance of 1989. At the core of Badescu’s analysis is Aleida Assmann’s (2015) notion of dialogic memory, supplemented with dialogic remembering’s attention to “relationality-in-conflict” (referred to by the author as “frictions”). Similar to the poetry collections discussed by Iovănel and Mironescu, which transcend the national framework by recalling contexts and events beyond Romania and its transition period (for instance, the civil wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Miruna Vlada’s Bosnia. Partition), the memory workshops examined by Badescu also engage with perspectives from both sides of the “Iron Curtain.” But even more importantly, the workshops brought together representatives of different generations, including those who did not have direct experience of communism and postsocialist transitions. Thus, they facilitated mnemonic dialogue between generations and in non-urban areas, emphasizing the benefits of rescaling memory work.

Two further contributions to this issue, by Joohee Kim (2026) and by Łukasz Zaremba (2026), develop the dialogic remembering approach by focusing on the dimension of visuality. Kim’s article is dedicated to Japanese military “comfort women.” It analyzes survivors’ vernacular memories and their role in constituting the official memory of the “comfort women” in South Korea. The author argues that victims’ testimonies, which were first voiced in the early 1990s, were subsumed into nationalist and diplomatic frameworks, including the landscape of South Korean politics as well as the relationship between South Korea and Japan. These dynamics led to comfort women’s faces being reduced to mere head counts, and to dialogue about their experiences and remembrance thereof transforming into monologue. Conceptually, Kim works with both agonistic memory and dialogic remembering, applying Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notion of “faciality” to her analysis. The study emphasizes the importance of visual encounter in the course of public remembrance. “Thus, the faciality of dialogic remembering operates as a political possibility that sustains the relational dimension of dialogue by overcoming the unpredictability and excess inherent in acts of dialogue through the visuality of the gaze” (Kim, this 2026).

In turn, Łukasz Zaremba examines contemporary visual artworks and examples of activism that engage in a silent, wordless dialogue with long-lasting historical anti-Black stereotypes in Poland. Drawing on visual culture studies, Zaremba demonstrates that racialized recognition also has a memory or, in other words, that the ways of “seeing race” are historical, complex, and imbued with the past. In his article, dialogic remembering does not designate a clash of two (or more) irreconcilable visions of history. Instead, he shows how contemporary Polish artists, with their knowledge of historical and often forgotten representations of distant and exoticized Otherness, conduct an archeology of this visual formula in Poland—a country with no history of colonialism or Black slavery, which is often regarded as “free of anti-Black racism.” The analyzed works, which include photography, oil painting and installations, constitute a distinct type of visual dialogue aimed at acknowledging and undermining the presence and persistence of historical formulas in the contemporary eye. The author argues that, as an artistic tactic in the visual field, dialogic remembering must take into account the dialogic nature of seeing itself.

Finally, in his contribution to this issue, Nicolás Villarroel (2026) employs a dialogical lens to analyze the memories of the Solidarity Campaign among Chilean exiles in Australia. His article demonstrates the (internal) diversity of memories, even among groups united by a common ideology, and emphasizes the importance of relational position-taking for understanding the articulation of difference within such a field. Villarroel explores this topic by drawing on data from in-depth interviews that he conducted with first- and second-generation exiles who arrived in Australia during two distinct waves of migration in the 1970s and 1980s. The author’s findings reveal two significant patterns in the recollections of the Solidarity Campaign, reflecting distinct facets of polyphony and dialogue: memories of conviviality and memories of political divisions and conflicts. These patterns shape the Campaign’s memory as an ambivalent subject, challenging monological notions of identity and solidarity.

This special issue concludes with two more contributions. Andrei Zavadski (2026) writes about Linn Schröder’s tackling of photography’s basic task to record memories and its limits, reviewing her artist book Ich denke auch Familienbilder (“I Think Family Pictures Too,” Hartmann Books, 2021) as well as an accompanying exhibition of the same name in Berlin (Robert Morat Galerie, 28 October—21 December 2023). The review utilizes “dialogic remembering” to analyze the mnemonic processes that take place between three generations of women thematized by Schröder’s book (the artist’s mother-in-law, the artist herself, and her daughters) in the course of the photographic project’s creation as well as during its display to the public. Finally, Joanna Wawrzyniak (2026) reflects on the potential of dialogic remembering in her Afterword to this issue.

The project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions,” which eventually gave birth to the idea of this special issue, started with our observation that memories of the transitions were increasingly instrumentalized and even weaponized by political actors, first and foremost from the right. With this project, we wanted to see whether we could identify ways of remembering the transitions that would do justice to the historical period’s complexity and that would help rebuild publics fragmented by historical and broader politics. While the method of dialogic remembering does indeed offer a—limited, but not insignificant—contribution to this endeavor, the developments across the world demonstrate opposite tendencies. Dialogue, in memory and otherwise, seems to be in disfavor at the moment, which is fueled by populist and/or authoritarian rhetoric and actions. This special issue was impacted by this, too. An article on the tenth anniversary of the 2013 anti-government Gezi Park protests in Turkey, in which the authors discussed the interconnecting effect of this event of resistance, had to be withdrawn from the journal shortly after its online publication due to the considerations of the authors’ and their informants’ safety. In this contribution, the authors showed that Gezi had become a point where representatives of ideologically different civil society organizations and political factions intersected their memories of the past and visions of the future. The article argued that, despite the government’s attempts to demonize it, Gezi continued to inform oppositional parts of Turkish society. The Gezi memory had become a bridge between generations as well as between different societal groups in Turkey and, at the same time, served as a lens, a vantage point from which current and future politics were viewed. Using this opportunity, we would like to express our solidarity with the article’s authors as well as all scholars-at-risk in Turkey and beyond.