King's College London

This interdisciplinary project brings together Ethnographic and Interactional Sociolinguistics (EIS) and Memory Studies (MS) to investigate how cultural meanings of conflict legacies take shape through communicative practices. To do this, data from existing projects on Sri Lankan Tamil and Greek-Cypriot diasporas in London, complemented with new data from Sri Lanka, will be analysed and compared. Sri Lanka and Cyprus are apposite cases to study as they involve protracted conflicts at different spatio-temporal/politico-institutional trajectories, allowing insight into the formation of conflict memories at different stages of culturalization, from barely institutionalised (Sri Lanka) to fully institutionalised (Cyprus).The project is significant as there has been little research that examines how communicative practices (traditionally examined in EIS) and affective practices associated with trauma can link to the formation of cultural memory (traditionally studied in MS). It will be thus one of the few comparative studies of memory that theorizes it from a bottom-up perspective.

Co-investigator

Dr. Constadina Charalambous (European University Cyprus)

Project team members

• Dr. Thomas Van de Putte – Assistant Professor (University of Trento, Italy)

• Professor Ben Rampton – Professor of Applied and Socio Linguistics (King’s College London)
• Dr. Emma McCluskey – Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences (University of Westminster)

• Professor Michalinos Zembylas - Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies (Open University of Cyprus)

• Minoya Patkunam – PhD student (King’s College London)

• Dr. Xanthia Aristidou - Project Manager at CARDET and a Scientific Collaborator (European University of Cyprus)