Blinken OSA Archivum at AHM 2025 Annual Conference
The 2025 Annual Conference of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) was held on July 2‒4, dedicated to the study of emotions, affect and feeling, and their connections to cultural heritage, cultural and collective memory processes, and material objects.
Recent debates on reciprocal relationship between heritage and emotions have reconsidered the importance of affect. No longer relegated solely to individual and psychological dimensions, emotions are considered as integral elements of social experience. Crossing academic, artistic and professional boundaries, the 2025 Annual Conference of AHM aimed to investigate how the past can be constituted as a battleground where emotions are designed, weaponized, and manipulated to advance political and ideological agendas or to shape the mobilizations of communities.
On the last day of the conference, a panel on (digital) archives examined affective and critical practices and processes in community archives, digital archives, and virtual museums, which curate difficult heritage. The Blinken OSA Archivum was represented by Chief Archivist Csaba Szilágyi, also affiliated with AHM, whose talk entitled "Emotional Engagement in the Critical Archiving of Violent Past(s)" examined the emotional and behavioral landscape of “the individual archivist and the archivist as an individual,” investigating how their emotions including engagement, detachment, nostalgia, and imagination influence the creation of new meanings and help account for the gaps and silences inherent in records of violent pasts.
The full program of the conference, information on the five keynotes and abstracts of the 25 panels are available on the conference website. Photos on the conference proceedings can be found here.
