"Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as ‘memories’ and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember? Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, this book c
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ritically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and students who are interested in understanding the algorithmically defined spaces of our lives." (Publisher description)
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"This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are
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frequently beyond the sphere of medical, legal, or state intervention. To address these different, often intertwined modes of language, the contributors provide a variety of disciplinary approaches to foster innovative debates and provoke new insights. Prevailing definitions of trauma can best be understood according to the cultural and historical conditions within which they exist. Languages of Trauma explores what this means in practice by scrutinizing varied historical moments from the First World War onwards and particular cultural contexts from across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa – striving to help decolonize the traditional Western-centred history of trauma, dissolving it into multifaceted transnational histories of trauma cultures." (Publisher description)
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"[...] The past does not really exist: it is only a story we tell ourselves. But what happens when we tell this story not only to ourselves but also to our followers, when it is recorded not only on our social media pages but also on the pages of hundreds or thousands of others, making it something
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that can be viewed and referenced forever? Social media networks are becoming vast digital archives in which the past merges seamlessly with the present, slowly erasing our capacity to forget. And yet at the same time, our memory is being outsourced to systems that we don't control and that could become obsolete at any time, cutting us off from our memories and risking total oblivion." (Back cover)
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"This document was developed as an instrument to support civil society organizations (CSOs) in Colombia in the development of oral archives and in the organization of their archival collections. It draws from the experience of GIJTR partners International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC) and
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Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG), and ICSC members Memoria Abierta (Argentina), Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi (Chile) and Centro de Memoria Monseñor Juan Gerardi (Guatemala), combined with lessons learned in supporting Colombian CSOs in preparing documentation for the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de la Verdad) Truth Commission. This practical guide highlights basic principles in developing oral archives based on interviews, and in organizing human rights documentation archives. Section 1 focuses on the development of oral archives, and Section 2 offers basic advice on the first steps to help CSOs organize their archives." (About this toolkit)
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"Nichts scheint ferner zu liegen, als während einer Pandemie über Gedächtnis nachzudenken. Wir stecken noch mittendrin. Aber das gesellschaftliche Erinnern und Vergessen von Pandemien hat die Erfahrung von Covid-19 stark vorgeprägt. Praktiken des historischen Erinnerns, des Archivierens und Gede
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nkens haben sich als wichtige Ressourcen inmitten der Coronavirus-Pandemie erwiesen. Und als erinnerter Gegenstand schließlich wird Covid-19 auch die Zukunft unserer Gesellschaft mitprägen. Deshalb diskutiere ich in diesem Beitrag die Rolle des kollektiven Gedächtnisses vor, während und nach der Coronavirus-Pandemie." (Einleitung)
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"As the revolutions across the Arab world that came to a head in 2011 devolved into civil war and military coup, representation and history acquired a renewed and contested urgency. The capacities of the internet have enabled sharing and archiving in an unprecedented fashion. Yet, at the same time,
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these facilities institute a globally dispersed reinforcement and recalibration of power, turning memory and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted goods. In The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, activists, artists, filmmakers, producers, and scholars examine which images of struggle have been created, bought, sold, repurposed, denounced, and expunged. As a whole, these cultural productions constitute an archive whose formats are as diverse as digital repositories looked after by activists, found footage art documentaries, Facebook archive pages, art exhibits, doctoral research projects, and ‘controversial’ or ‘violent’ protest videos that are abruptly removed from YouTube at the click of a mouse by sub-contracted employees thousands of kilometers from where they were uploaded. The Arab Archive investigates the local, regional, and international forces that determine what materials, and therefore which pasts, we can access and remember, and, conversely, which pasts get erased and forgotten." (Back cover)
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"This book explores the nexus of media and memory practices in contemporary Slovenia. In the age of mediatised societies, the country’s post-socialist, post-Yugoslav present has become saturated with historical revisionism and various nostalgic framings of the past. Pušnik and Luthar have collect
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ed a wide range of case studies analysing the representation and reinterpretation of past events in newspapers, theatre, music, museums, digital media, and documentaries. The volume thus presents insights into the intricacies of the mediatisation of memory in contemporary Slovenian society. The authors engage with dynamic uses of media today and provide new analyses of media culture as archive, site of historical reinterpretation, and repository of memory." (Publisher description)
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"This article presents the main results of a research project that aims to analyze the construction of cultural memory through fictional series that represented the dictatorship period of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Based on interviews and focus groups with young people between 18 and 24 years old wh
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o did not live this historical period, the importance of the melodramatic structures of the series is discussed to promote learning about the recent past, thus emphasizing the public pedagogical role that television fills." (Abstract)
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"La Cátedra Unesco de Comunicación en su XXV edición se diseñó como un espacio para reflexionar sobre comunicación, información y lenguajes de la memoria. Con esa perspectiva, se consideró fundamental analizar el papel de la ciencia de la información en los procesos de recuperación, preser
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vación y divulgación de la memoria colectiva. En segundo lugar, desde los estudios del lenguaje, se buscó construir una agenda de investigación orientada a la generación de saberes pertinentes y el fomento de prácticas de intervención social que apuntaran a la recuperación de narrativas olvidadas o aún no contadas que, en conjunto, permitieran reconstruir la memoria del país. Y, en tercer lugar, analizar los procesos de representación, circulación y apropiación social del conocimiento que sobre la memoria se vienen realizando desde la comunicación social, el periodismo y áreas afines. Este libro compila, en la primera parte, doce textos de los conferencistas y panelistas que participaron en la Cátedra y, en la segunda parte, se incluyen los resúmenes de las ponencias presentadas en nueve grupos temáticos de trabajo, en los que participaron miembros de diversas universidades, estudiantes, profesores, investigadores y activistas sociales de todo el país." (Cubierta del libro)
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"The aim of this chapter is to consider the past, present, and future of journalism and memory in two senses: first, as time periods in the evolution of this area of research and, second, as thematic elements in the scholarship on journalism and memory. In other words, how does journalism address so
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cieties’ past, present, and future through its memory work? Reflecting this twofold purpose, the chapter moves from the roots and founders of this subfield to four main contemporary areas of research focusing on: (1) journalists’ direct engagement with the past through practices such as commemorative/anniversary journalism; (2) the various ways in which memory is used by journalists in their coverage of current events; (3) the relationship between memory and journalism’s orientation to the future; and (4) the memory of journalism itself and how journalists use it to establish their identity, boundaries, and authority. In addition to surveying key studies and concepts with regards to these themes, each of these four sections also discusses remaining challenges and questions. The concluding section of the chapter presents a broad agenda for future research." (Pages 420-421)
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"This book deals with literary representations of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Its focus is a transnational, polyphonic writing project entitled Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire (Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory), undertaken in 1998 by a group of nine African authors. Anna-Marie
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de Beer's study emphasizes the Afropolitan cultural frame in which the texts were conceived. Instead of using Western and Eurocentric tropes, this volume looks at an African conflict situated in a collectivist society and written about by writers of African origin. This approach enables a situated study, in which it becomes possible to draw out local notions of ubuntu, oral testimonies, mourning traditions, healing and storytelling strategies, and the presence of the 'invisible'. These texts are written in French and to date not all of them have been translated into English. The book assists in connecting English-speaking readers not only to a set of texts written in French with significant literary and cultural value, but also to francophone trauma studies research." (Publisher description)
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"Este artigo tem por objetivo examinar a relevância de produções de contrainformação desenvolvidas durante a ditadura militar no Brasil por grupos religiosos. O objeto é a revista Paz e Terra, da Editora Civilização Brasileira nos anos 1960, como iniciativa ímpar no campo da comunicação r
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eligiosa, ecumênica e política. A fim de se responder à questão-problema “qual o lugar da revista Paz e Terra na memória das produções midiáticas religiosas no Brasil?” são tomados por base estudos sobre “suportes da memória” e “lugares de memória”. A articulação entre a narrativa da memória de Paz e Terra e a descrição do conteúdo dos dez exemplares publicados, que forma a metodologia da pesquisa empregada, foi feita com base no acervo da revista, em pesquisa documental, em depoimentos de personagens envolvidas, colhidos durante pesquisa para o Mestrado em Memória Social da autora, e em obras sobre a Editora Civilização Brasileira e seu editor Ênio Silveira, sobre as lideranças evangélicas envolvidas no projeto e sobre a própria revista." (Resumo)
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"In this chapter, I analyze transnational memory following the four elements outlined in the introduction—actors, structures, practices, and outcomes—in the case of the disappearances of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, in 2014. First, I discuss why the issue of agency and the outco
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mes of transnational memory represents a “hard” aspect for theorization. Then, drawing on the work of Kurasawa (2007), I propose to approach transnational memory as a crucial component of the project of global justice. Kurasawa stresses the importance of conceiving of human rights not as ontological attributes that we enjoy as members of humankind but as a set of practices, “capacities that groups and persons produce, activate and must exercise by pursuing ethico-political labor.” After sketching the sociopolitical context of the Mexican “War on Drugs,” I analyze the transnational memory work in this case in three different initiatives: the work of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI for its Spanish initials), the Forensic Architecture online platform “The Ayotzinapa Case: A Cartography of Violence,” and the initiative Ayotzinapa: Visual Action. Read together, these actions cover a spectrum of actors—intergovernmental organizations, research centers, activists, and artists, as well as different dimensions: legal, forensic, aesthetic. Finally, I discuss the potential of “structurally transformative agency” (Hays 1994: 64) to disrupt the structure of impunity that has prevailed in Mexico." (Page 48)
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"The aim of this monograph is an attempt to examine the relationship between collective memory and oral texts. The material basis for this presentation consists of folklore oral texts, both prosaic and poetic, different as regards their genres (fairy tales, fables, recollections, traditions, legends
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, proverbs, and songs) as well as texts that are fragments of spontaneous interviews. The monograph consists of five main parts devoted to the following themes: theoretical considerations, the relation between memory and language, text memory, genre memory, and the relation between memory and the folk artistic style." (Publisher description)
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"This volume explores the shifting tides of how political violence is memorialized in today's decentralized, digital era. The book enhances our understanding of how the digital turn is changing the ways that we remember, interpret, and memorialize the past. It also raises practical and ethical quest
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ions of how we should utilize these tools and study their impacts. Cases covered include memorialization efforts related to the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Europe (the Holocaust), and Armenia; to non-genocidal violence in Haiti, and the Portuguese Colonial War on the African Continent; and of the September 11 attacks on the United States." (Publisher description)
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"Where do we end up when we enter the time machine that is the digital game? One axiomatic truth of historical research is that the past is the time-space that eludes human intervention. Every account made of the past is therefore only an approximation. But how is it that strolling through ancient A
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lexandria can feel so real in the virtual world? Claims of authenticity are prominent in discussions surrounding the digital games of our time. What is historical authenticity and does it even matter? When does authenticity or the lack thereof become political? By answering these questions, the book illuminates the ubiquitous category of authenticity from the perspective of historical game studies." (Publisher description)
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