ABSTRACT
My research focuses on how imaginaries and memories are produced. In an upcoming book, I examine what they are used for, and whether there are better ways of ‘doing memory’ in order to promote what I call ‘responsible cosmopolitanism’. My research concerns itself with how, in an entangled world, shared memories of particular groups transcend the national scale or operate at a scale below it (see De Cesari and Rigney 2014). I am especially interested in complexities and tensions of scale (local, national, transregional, transareal, transnational and global). My role as a memory studies researcher has been to travel to places across the Afrasian Sea and to visit sites of connected histories in Arabia, Asia and Africa (see Karugia 2018). There I meet scholars and other memory actors in order to interview them and in some cases to conduct field research together with them. I also collect and analyse their publications, striving to bring their fragmented perspectives on Afrasian and Afrabian memories into conversation and comprehension within a connective Afrasian Sea framework.
