Seed funding for the research project “Island Memories: Exploring the Intersection of Local and Digital Memory Practices” by Impuls Forschung of the Hanse University Alliance

ZeMKI member Dr. Rieke Böhling and Dr. Berber Hagedoorn (University of Groningen, Netherlands) receive seed funding from the Hanse University Alliances’s Impuls Forschung program to hold two workshops – one on the North Sea island of Spiekeroog (Germany) and one on Schiermonnikoog (Netherlands). 

The project builds on collaboratively conducted fieldwork during Berber Hagedoorn’s fellowship at ZeMKI in fall 2025, where Hagedoorn and Böhling visited different exhibitions that document island history and spoke to local actors involved in memory making. Preliminary findings underline that memory practices on the islands emphasize shared experience, collective identification, and localized custodianship but that they lack an “outside” perspective, for instance by former islanders who have migrated to other places as well as tourists. The co-creative workshops are meant to address this gap by encouraging research participants to contribute (digital) memory objects related to their island memories. These memory objects will be displayed online.