Introduction to the special issue: Slowly shifting toward slow memory

This article introduces the special issue Slow Memory Studies , which emerges from the COST Action “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change.” In a world defined by rapid technological, socio economic, and political shifts, the concept of slow memory offers an alternative analytical framework that foregrounds gradual, often imperceptible transformations shaping everyday life. Rather than centring spectacular events or crises, slow memory highlights non-eventful, embodied, and situated forms of remembering that unfold across long temporal horizons. Drawing on interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars of work, welfare, and methodologies of memory, this special issue demonstrates how slow memory provides new ways to understand deindustrialization, care systems, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The contributions explore how memory operates within slow moving processes such as economic restructuring, erosion of welfare infrastructures, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, showing how these processes remain largely invisible in dominant narratives. By engaging with feminist, participatory, artistic, and curatorial approaches, the articles also illustrate the methodological possibilities of slow memory as an ethical and political practice. Collectively, the issue argues for a reorientation of memory studies toward temporalities of slowness that enable more inclusive, attentive, and socially just forms of remembering.