Please join us for the third public online talk of 2025 of the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group (CDTRWG).
CDTRWG maintains and updates SAA's Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit; develops and provides immediate and ongoing resources and response assistance to archivists, allied cultural heritage professionals, and their communities in times of tragedies, disasters, or other crises; and builds partnerships with organizations focused on relief efforts and cultural stewardship and preservation. As part of that partnership building, we are conducting a series of public talks in 2025 to hear about related work.
The afterlife of the post-2015 Paris attacks memorials: from streets to museums with Gérôme Truc, tenured researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research)
Wednesday, October 8th, 2025, 12pm EDT (8am EDT; 9pm PDT; 5pm BST)
Register for the event
Summary
Ten years on, this talk will look back at the grassroots memorials appeared in the streets of Paris following the 13 November 2015 attacks, the worst terrorist attack France has seen in recent decades. We will first look at how the collecting process was organised, based on a completely new partnership between archivists, researchers and cleaning staff from the City of Paris, how previous cases of similar collections inspired this work, and how it was experienced by the main participants. We will then discuss the future of the objects and documents collected from the memorials, their scientific uses (what did they teach to researchers?) and their heritage value (what will be their place in the future French museum and memorial of terrorism, due to open in 2028? What other exhibitions have they already been featured in, how and why?).
Biography
Gérôme Truc is a tenured researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and deputy director of the Institute for Social Sciences of Politics. A specialist in responses to terrorist attacks in Western societies and their memorialisation, he initiated the collection by the city of Paris of the contents of the grassroots memorials appeared after the 13 November 2015 attacks. From 2021 to 2023, he also served as scientific advisor to the team responsible for designing the French memorial and museum of terrorism. His work was distinguished with the CNRS bronze medal (2025).
The event will not be recorded.
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Rebecca Tinker
Archives Assistant/Archival Data Associate
Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University
New Haven CT
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