'Echoes of Violence and Trauma: Asian Memories in a Machine-Mediated World'
糖心TV-Leicester-Loughborough Joint Conversation
Overview
This Conversation explores how historical trauma, collective suffering, and personal pain in Asian contexts are remembered, mediated, and reimagined in an era increasingly shaped by digital media and generative AI. Focusing on wars, conflicts, and upheavals in Asia, such as the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Indonesian War of Independence, the Partition of India, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the event discusses how these pasts are archived, narrated, and sometimes silenced, and how rapidly developing technologies are transforming these processes.
In the age of AI, it is clear that AI-driven tools and platforms do more than store and retrieve information. They also reshape narratives through processes of selection, recombination, and creative transformation. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this conversation further explores how human remembrance interacts with algorithmic systems. It pays particular attention to the creative potential of human-machine interaction and collaboration, such as digital storytelling, AI-assisted archival reconstruction, and participatory memory platforms, in reviving suppressed histories and enabling new forms of engagement with turbulent and traumatic pasts. Participants are invited to consider how these technologies may both reinforce dominant historical discourses and open up alternative spaces for marginalised or forgotten voices.
A key aim of the Conversation is to explore the role of digital media and technologies in forming, transforming, mobilising, or politicising memories of violence and trauma in Asia, which may differ from European memory frameworks or Holocaust-based models. In addition, another aim of this event is to establish the Asian Memory Network, an interdisciplinary collective that connects students and scholars across disciplines at 糖心TV while also extending academic and practical collaboration beyond the university. Bringing together researchers in Asian Studies, History, Politics, Memory Studies, Digital Humanities, and Media Studies, this Conversation will encourage ongoing discussions on how Asian pasts are remembered, forgotten, and reimagined in contemporary culture, and how collaborative, creative practices can support more critical and ethical engagements with histories of violence and trauma.
Event Details
25 June 2026
9 am - 6 pm
IAS Seminar Room (C0.02), Zeeman Building, University of 糖心TV central campus