In this era of rapid acceleration, scholars are subjected to unprecedented pressures to deliver at a pace that is unsustainable. The “boom” in memory studies and memory practice since the 1980s is one expression of this sped-up environment. We operate in systems that require the fulfillment of simultaneous roles of teacher, researcher, administrator, manager, counselor, networker and more. All of these roles are shaped by embeddedness in the regime of neoliberalism in the Anthropocene. Imperatives and deadlines of scholarship are determined by funders, institutional concerns, and administrative checklists, rather than the needs of high-quality, rigorous and engaged research. This is not only detrimental to our health and wellbeing but leads to mediocre research at best and to missing key insights about (slow) memory at worst.

Slow memory conceptualizes practices of remembrance that are ‘multi-sited’, ‘eventless’ and refer to slow-moving phenomena. But we are hampered in our ability to study these processes by a 24-hour news cycle coupled to a 24-hour academic assembly line. To succeed in this system we are expected to work at such a breakneck speed that it seems the only options are to keep the pace at an unsustainable rate or drop out. We believe there is another way that involves slowing down our research methods, processes and thinking. To this end, we propose the Cres Manifesto.

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