Paula Fiúza, a PhD student in Sociomuseology, took part in the IX Iberian Forum of Museological Studies, held in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid (Spain), last September.

During the event, Paula presented a paper titled “Affective Memory as a Territory of Listening and Reconnection: paths to reframe boundaries and narratives in the museum”, reflecting on the role of Affective Memory in redefining symbolic, spatial, and identity boundaries within the museological field.

Grounded in Sociomuseology and Social Museology, her proposal views museums not merely as institutions of preservation but as living territories where collective memories and individual experiences intersect, revealing tensions, silences, and possibilities for reconnection.

Inspired by the writings of bell hooks, particularly All About Love, and by community-based knowledge that recognizes affection as a structuring force, the researcher argues that listening is also a way of rebuilding bonds and fostering belonging in contexts marked by displacement, fragmentation, and exclusion.

In this perspective, the museum territory is understood as a space of crossings—physical, affective, and symbolic—where the recognition of subjectivities becomes a condition for building fairer and more grounded narratives.

Affective Memory is presented as a methodological and epistemological device capable of unveiling layers of meaning that often escape conventional exhibition models. By engaging with stories circulating outside institutional collections, the proposal repositions the museum as a space of negotiation between different ways of being in the world, acknowledging the dignity of voices that have often been overlooked.

Included in the thematic axis “Frontier, Territory, and Memory”, the presentation explored how listening and affectivity can disrupt dichotomies such as center and margin, past and present, presence and absence—advocating for the coexistence of multiple layers of memory and belonging in the construction of a museum more attuned to the histories and temporalities of the people who inhabit it.