Research Team 3:
"Collective subjectivities, space and memory"

RT3 focuses on the relationships between forms of public sociality and the construction of collective subjectivities in urban settings in the 20th century as processes in which the concepts of space and time play a decisive role. The research is based on the theoretical assumption that public sociality, collective subjectivities and social identities can be examined as mutually produced. In order to understand these relationships, the research emphasises the dimension of space. Space mediates the production of social relations, collectivities and forms of sociality through imagined or ‘material’ geographies that demarcate them and are simultaneously defined by them. Memory is an equally important factor in the way social collectivities are organised in the urban space and orient their action.

RT3 is based at the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean. Four members of the Main Research Team are faculty members of the same department: Haris Exertzoglou, Associate Professor and Team Leader; Maria Stamatoyiannopoulou, Assistant Professor; Yiannis Yiannitsiotis, Assistant Professor; and Pothiti Hantzaroula, Assistant Professor. Vaggelis Kechriotis, Assistant Professor at Boğadiçi University, Turkey, participates as an Invited Researcher.

The members of the RT3 have undertaken the following case studies:

Haris Exertzoglou, “Collective subjectivity and memory. The refugee associations of Athens during the interwar period”
The Asia Minor Disaster was a crucial point in Greek history, not only for its immediate material consequences but also because it compelled refugees and their host society to rethink their identities. This case study examines voluntary associations of Greek Orthodox refugees in Athens, shedding light on the ways in which these associations negotiated a new collective identity in relation to their complicated relations with the host society. It will also extend this insight to discuss the making of a distinct refugee identity among following generations of refugee origin with no immediate experience of the expulsion from Asia Minor.

Vaggelis Kechriotis, “The associations and institutions of Smyrna (1860-1922). The social representations of the Greek-Orthodox middle class”
This case study examines the voluntary associations of Orthodox Greeks in Smyrna in the period 1860-1922 through a variety a sources: the local press, associations’ statutes, presidential and committee proceedings, etc. It aims at exploring the ways in which through particular forms of public sociality Ottoman-Greeks represented and produced relations of power, social hierarchies and collective subjects with local, professional or ethnic character.

Pothiti Hantzaroula, “Aspects of the sociality of Jews in post-war Thessaloniki and Athens: Identities after the catastrophe”
This case study focuses on the role of various Jewish institutions, through which Greek Jews in post-war Athens and Thessaloniki reconstructed their life and identity. Based on oral and written testimonies, it also explores memory and forgetting as important factors in shaping the survivors’ forms of sociality and collective subjectivity. It aims at studying the actions that the different collectivities developed in order to reconstruct the decimated Jewish communities and to cope with the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust, as well as their role in shaping new subjectivities in the post-war society.

Yiannis Yiannitsiotis, “Spatial dimensions of public sociality: The area of Kifissia in the decades 1950-1970”
This study examines collective actions with public orientation, as they are organised and expressed within voluntary associations, as well as informal initiatives that develop at neighbourhood level or centred on neighbourhoods and are related to the processes of urbanisation in post-war Greece. Through the example of post-war Kifissia, the spatial dimensions of locality and their relation to local identities are examined.

Maria Stamatoyiannopoulou, “Constructions of middle-class subjectivity in Mytilini: associations and forms of public sociality (1890-1940).”
This case study focuses on the collective activities of the middle class in the port-town of Mytilini in the late 19th and the early 20th century, the transitional period during which the island of Lesvos passed from Ottoman to Greek administration. Emphasis is given to literary, sport and philanthropic associations and their relation with the making of a bourgeois subjectivity. The interrelation of the public and the private for the constitution of public sociality is considered of equal importance, in particular the ways in which the organisation of kinship imposes specific versions of public sociality.