About “Knowledge Exchange for Slow Hope”

Knowledge Exchange for Slow Hope (KESH) brings together the projects funded by the HERA/CHANSE Joint Research Programme Crisis – Perspectives from the Humanities and is led by Professor of History & Memory Studies Jenny Wüstenberg (Nottingham Trent University) as Knowledge Exchange Fellow (KEF).

Running from January 2025 to June 2028, KESH is working alongside the ten projects to:

1. Support communication and collaboration with stakeholders;
2. Provide needs-based training, delivered by external experts, the KESH team or Crisis project members;
3. Nurture strong cohort relationships to create foundations for future partnerships.

KESH is pursuing four core objectives:

1. To facilitate knowledge exchange across the cohort of funded Crisis projects, as well as with their stakeholders, to enhance and amplify the impact of research;
2. To enable learning and skills development across all projects. Particular foci will be on public engagement, development of early career scholars and those from Widening countries, and creative approaches to communicating about crises;
3. To establish networks of collaboration and trust, as well as impact that will outlast the funding period.
4. To act as an advocate for the importance of the Humanities and Social Sciences in the present and future, with a view to boosting funding and support within and beyond Europe.

 

Why Slow? Why Hope?

Our KE strategy is premised on the principle of “Slow Hope” (Mauch 2019): while remaining clear-headed about the challenges faced, we argue that stories of hope are indispensable. We advocate for a thoughtful and deliberate crisis response, emphasising the importance of storytelling, historical and cultural understanding, and the nurturing of relationships that inspire hope and solidarity, rather than anguish. We will make the case for the positive and creative potential of the humanities in the current moment through spotlighting excellence in research and engaging with key European and national policy forums. KESH will thus advocate for the humanities as a critical resource that requires sustained funding and support.

Over the course of KESH, the KEF and her team aim to pursue “slowness”, that is, creating space and time to work together and build research relationships through “slow meetings”. Slowing down does not negate the need for urgent action, but means transforming how we work with partners and each other and how we narrate our actions and aspirations. This approach was developed by Wüstenberg in the Slow Memory COST Action and refers to a kind of “flipped” gathering, where thinking about joint challenges happens in often informal settings so that participants emerge energised rather than exhausted. The goal is that KESH does not increase participants’ workload but nevertheless produces joint outcomes that amount to more than the sum of its parts.

 

KESH Team

Knowledge Exchange Facilitator (KEF) – Jenny Wüstenberg, Professor of History and Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University’s School of Arts & Humanities.

Wüstenberg’s research interests include comparative politics and history; memory politics in Europe, in settler colonial societies, and transnationally; civic activism, social movements, and democratization; the memory of slow-moving and large-scale change (including biodiversity loss and family separation); and qualitative and relational methodologies. Her monograph Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2017 and in German translation in 2020. Her forthcoming monograph Slow Memory: Remembering Gradual Change in an Accelerating World is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Wüstenberg is one of the founding Co-Presidents of the Memory Studies Association, and is the Chair of the COST Action CA20105 on Slow Memory (2021-2025). She was also the founding Co-Chair of the Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe in the Council for European Studies and the Co-Chair of the German Studies Association’s Interdisciplinary Memory Studies Network. From 2021-24, she was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Post-Socialist Britain?, which was led by Prof. Sara Jones (University of Birmingham).

After receiving her Ph.D. in Government & Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2010, Wüstenberg taught at the School of International Service at American University. From October 2012 to December 2013, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin Program of Advanced German & European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. From January to December 2014, she worked for the Independent Academic Commission at the Federal Ministry of Justice for the Critical Study of the National Socialist Past. Before joining NTU in 2019, Wüstenberg served as DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor in Politics and German & European Studies at York University in Toronto.

 

Research and Innovation Associate – Dr Samantha Vaughn

Dr Samantha Vaughn holds a PhD in Museum, Gallery and Heritage Studies, awarded in 2024 from Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests include post-conflict heritage and memory, particularly the representation of difficult pasts in the museum space, the intersections of heritage and national identity, visitor experiences of post-conflict sites, and the role of heritage in social justice. In 2025, she led the organisation of the inaugural conference for the Museums and Memory, a working group of the Memory Studies Association, and published her chapter, “Communicating Post-communist Identity through the Museum of Life Under Communism, Warsaw” in the edited volume Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production (CEU Press). In addition to her role as Research and Innovation Associate, she is co-editor of the upcoming edited volume Entangled Pasts and the Political Present: Global Museum Narratives (De Gruyter).

 

Institute of Knowledge Exchange Practice (IKEP) – Kelly Auty, Head of IKEP

Auty will act in an advisory capacity, as well as leading 2-4 training sessions (depending on initial needs analysis) with the Crisis research teams.

The Institute for Knowledge Exchange Practice (IKEP) is the hub for Knowledge Exchange (KE) development and best practice at NTU. It supports excellence in Knowledge Exchange through building capacity for colleagues to develop commercial and economic work, IP exploitation and working with charities, professional bodies, policy makers and influencers. In addition, it develops student and graduate knowledge exchange and public and community engagement, with and without research, for social and economic benefit.

 

Activities

KESH will lead a series of activities over its three and a half years. Slowness underpins each of these events. Each one will be organized in such a way that the Crisis team members have the time and support to work together, thus reducing stress-levels. Rather than requiring participants to prepare extensively for KESH events, our meetings offer time to debate, write, and even craft together. KESH firmly believes that when interlocutors engage in activities like walking, stone carving or cooking together, ideas often flow in unexpected directions and more easily than during the standard conference panel format. Participants also return to the “everyday life” of their respective projects energised, rather than exhausted.

Activities include a kick-off conference, which was held in Nottingham from 24-25 November 2025, as well as a closing conference, planned for December 2027. KESH will also host a series of online and in-person training workshops, with topics inspired by both an initial needs analysis with the Crisis teams themselves as well as the conversations which emerged out of the launch conference in 2025. Foci include theory and methods development, professional development, and creative strategies for engaging with crisis discourses. The first series of activities and workshops will take place in Spring and Summer 2026, with topics on the value of failure, ethics in crisis research, podcasting, and policy brief writing.

Mention of the kick-off conference in the second paragraph should also be hyperlinked to its dedicated webpage: https://heranet.info/2025/11/26/crisis-perspectives-from-the-humanities-kick-off-conference-for-the-10-funded-projects/

 

 

Contact us

Prof Jenny Wüstenberg – [email protected]