This research seminar explores contemporary society’s ongoing struggles to remember difficult pasts. Built around an anthropological exploration of concepts such as memory, trauma, mourning, silence, voice, testimony, perpetration and victimhood, the course aims to provide students with conceptual tools and approaches for understanding how societies come to terms with complex, divided, and violence-ridden pasts. It asks what happens when long-silenced voices demand reckoning with collective traumas of past state violence, turning memory into a global social, cultural, and political force. How can one represent difficult and contested pasts? What does it mean to enable long-silenced voices to be heard? What are the consequences, and for whom, of breaking taboos around past trauma? How does memory function as both a national political project and an intimate source of identity? This class pays special attention to ethnographic approaches that grapple with the elusive movement of memory across generations, time, and space. Materials are drawn from scholarly literature in the social sciences and humanities, graphic novels, film and animation, following empirical cases from around the world as they unsettle taken-for-granted senses of community and the nation, break silences, elicit backlashes, and grapple with the political legitimacy of the state. Despite wide-ranging cases, this course is not a comprehensive survey or history, but grapples with core questions about the politics of memory in action. The course involves substantial reading and writing and the completion of an original research project.