Current Projects

Rachel Huber is in charge of the research project "Auslegeordnung Erinnerungskultur Stadt Zürich" (third party funded project) of the Presidential Department of the City of Zurich. The study serves the city of Zurich as a preliminary concept for a larger strategy for the administration's handling of the city's culture of remembrance. Rachel Huber, PD Dr. Barbara Lüthi and Mag. Katharina Morawek are developing theoretical foundations and a glossary of terms for this purpose. In addition, they will use the method of reflexive grounded theory to collect empirical data on the situation of remembrance culture in the city of Zurich and, on the basis of comparative possible practices, develop conditions for success in dealing with a pluralistic past and burdened objects of remembrance culture in public space. Project duration May 2022-March 2023.

Completed Projects

In her dissertation project, Rachel Huber took up current social issues such as gender equality, digitalisation and male-dominated memory cultures. Using an exemplary case, she examined how one-sided metanarratives can be feminised by means of digital memory cultures. By following the traces of historical actors and witnesses of the Red Power movement, the indigenous resistance in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and comparing them with their analogue traces in archives in the USA and Europe, she made visible that female Red Power activists were decisive for the success of the political resistance and contributed with genuinely female grassroots activism to the enactment of pro-indigenous US laws that were intended to improve the social reality of indigenous societies. The fact that women were qualitatively as well as quantitatively important for Red Power has so far been ignored by the dominant narrative. In the study, all relevant Red Power actions were examined from the perspective of women and, by means of a methodological novelty in historical studies, the addition of born-digital ego-documents, it was worked out that indigenous women activists did not act in the background - in the kitchen and care - as the standard literature on the subject suggests, but took up arms themselves and fought on the sometimes very violent resistance front. In terms of the history of science, the finding means that women's achievements have been made invisible, although analogue, digital and oral sources have long been available. Finally, the study revealed how contemporary witnesses produce self-referential born-digital sources on the online web and thus influence global digital memory cultures.