Corals and Concrete: Exploring Non-Human Agents in Memory Studies

The 2026 workshop Memory Matters: Non-Human Agents in Memory Studies, organized by the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at the University of Regensburg, explored how material things and natural elements shape the way we remember the past: 

Drawing on approaches such as new materialism, it started from the idea that matter—landscapes, rivers, ruins, museum objects, even geological strata—is not just a passive backdrop to human history.

Could you illustrate this?
The agency of matter becomes apparent in and through relations between human and non-human actors. The non-human can and does store traces of the past—be it the wars and tribulations of the 20th century, the brutality of settler colonialism in early modern history, or the history of the Earth from the perspective of geological deep time. In this sense, it has the potential to allow for a nuanced approach to the past and the present, one that goes beyond the invariably biased, always partial, and comparably short-lived human viewpoint.

Yet, this potential can only be realized if human actors engage with the non-human. For example, they can extract corals and minerals (or leave them in their natural habitat), exhibit plants and objects in museums (or not), or incorporate the landscape into their artistic practices or literary texts. Agency emerges as a continuum of relations between humans and non-humans, both of which play a role in its unfolding. 

Tatiana Sitchinava, one of our participants, is a human geographer working in Georgia. In her presentation she focused an understudied topic in Western scholarship—the large-scale deportation of different peoples from the Caucasus to Siberia and Central Asia, during the height of the Stalinist terror in the 1940s. More specifically, she discussed the forced displacement of, among others, Meskhetian Turks, Caucasus Germans, and Greeks from western Georgia.

Even though many of them never returned to Georgia, she showed how material traces of their presence are still embedded in the landscape, in the form of German half-timbered houses or repurposed wine cellars, for instance. These ruins and relics complicate the memory of Stalinism in Georgia, which is divided between glorifying Stalin as a Georgian leader of the Soviet Union and remembering the painful legacy of the atrocities he perpetrated. However, Tatiana’s findings also have broader implications.

Participants presented different perspectives, all of which emphasized the importance of challenging traditional methods of memory studies and adopting a more material-oriented approach. One notable stance was the role of objects in tracing entangled knowledge regimes and collective memory. In that case, a comprehensive analysis of material objects can also challenge institutionalized knowledge of the past.

Others stated that environment and landscape can be participants of remembrance of traumatic past, hence one cannot fully reconstruct the memory without considering material context. Moreover, implementing non-human agents in research is more diverse and gives opportunity of more artistic and interactive approaches. Therefore, with co-operation with non-human agents, memory study can become co-constituted.

Our keynote speaker, Simon Probst, discussed the challenges of misusing certain terms when talking about agents of deep time. He noted that the concepts of memory and archives are very new Western ideas. Therefore, we should be cautious when discussing non-human agents of deep time in order to avoid misinterpreting terms.

What open questions did the discussions reveal?

While the discussions highlighted the versatility of the concept of non-human agency and its adaptability across diverse theoretical frameworks, a central takeaway of the workshop was the challenge of formulating an account of non-human agency that remains conscious of its own hermeneutic positioning and critically reflects on the cultural preconceptions projected onto non- human agents.

Looking back at the two days, what do you consider the most important outcome of the workshop?

Throughout the workshop, we explored the concept of non-human agents from various disciplinary perspectives and regional contexts. One of the most important outcomes was our shared recognition that the "non-human" functions as a productive theoretical framework that is conceptually flexible and empirically applicable. At the same time, our discussions highlighted that its meaning and implications vary significantly depending on the specific historical, cultural and regional settings in which it is mobilized.

Anni-Lotta Hamer studied cultural sciences in Frankfurt (Oder) and received her master's degree in Eastern European studies from the Free University of Berlin. She is currently working on a project entitled "Geological Deep Time of the Gulag," which analyzes a poetics of knowledge of pre-human timescales in works of autofictional and fictional Gulag literature.