Movement Memory-Scapes: Remembering the Decade of Mass Protest under Authoritarianism

Application summary

Mass protests create decisive ruptures, yet their long-term impact depends on how they are remembered. This multidisciplinary project examines how protestors’ memories shift from records of past events into tools of resistance, solidarity, and survival across cycles of mobilization under rising authoritarianism. It focuses on two landmark protest waves in Türkiye: 2013 Gezi and 2025 Saraçhane Protests. Gezi was the largest urban mobilization in Türkiye’s recent history, generating unprecedented solidarities but also facing violent repression, mass arrests, and systematic silencing. Saraçhane—the largest mobilization since Gezi—erupted when Istanbul’s opposition mayor was arrested. Protesters revived Gezi’s chants, slogans, and symbols, showing how memory inspires democratic imagination under consolidated authoritarianism. The project fills a gap by examining how, under repression, the interplay of collective memory and memory activism enables movements to sustain continuity and democratic hope. It asks: under repression, what determines whether protest memories endure, are strategically deployed, or erased? Theoretically, it develops the framework of movement memory-scapes, showing how emotional, visual, verbal, and spatial dimensions of memory sustain resistance across time. Empirically, it generates new knowledge on how memories of events, practices, and state violence are preserved, reinterpreted, and mobilized in new cycles of dissent. Methodologically, it applies a multi-method qualitative design: (1)narrative interviews, (2)memory mapping, and (3)archival analysis of state discourse. Researchers and a filmmaker collaborate to capture protest memory in textual and visual forms. Outputs include journal articles, a monograph, a PhD dissertation, and a documentary with festival screenings. Studying Gezi and Saraçhane provides a global mirror, showing how memory sustains democratic resistance wherever civic space is shrinking—from Hungary to the United States.