Rescaling memory: Dialogic practices and intergenerational engagement in rural Romania

This article illustrates the transformative potential of dialogic memory practices by examining a series of workshops in rural Romania that decentralized memory work by engaging local libraries in intergenerational dialogue. Organized within the Europe for Citizens project Reshaping the Image of Democratic Revolutions 1989 , the Romanian initiative shifted attention from national commemorative centers to villages largely absent from dominant narratives of 1989. Librarians emerged as key mediators of remembrance, facilitating encounters between generations with uneven relationships to the communist past, including young participants with no lived experience of socialism. The workshops reveal the dynamics and micropolitics of memory transmission in contexts usually overlooked by memory work, showing how European and national frames are selectively reinterpreted through local concerns and affective remembrance. Rather than producing consensus, these exchanges generate what the article terms centripetal memory dynamics , in which memories are brought closer together through community mediation.