“How can narrating the past change the future?”. Ann Rigney gave her farewell lecture at Universiteit Utrecht on December 6, 2024. To celebrate this moment there has been a collective effort to create a liber amicorum ‘Dynamics, Memory, Mediation: Doing Memory Studies with Ann Rigney’ (edited by Astrid Erll, Susanne Knittel and Jenny Wüstenberg); a handbook mapping the field of memory studies and where it is moving to.

Nicole Immler took a part of this project with a chapter on ‘How (Post) Memory Matters to Justice?’. The chapter brings memory studies and transitional justice in a more intense dialogue. She revisits a specific moment in time, when Rigney, Damien Short and Immler edited a Special Issue on “Reconciliation and Memory: Critical Perspectives” (Memory Studies 2012), to scrutinize the reconciliation paradigm dominant since the late 1990s. Discussing the current debate on reparations for Dutch slavery she shows how ‘repair’ became the crucial term to push for a more systemic change.

The full volume can be downloaded here.