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Kate Charlesworth's graphic narrative Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide (2019), part memoir and part documentary of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex life and activism in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2019, remembers the time when the LGBTQI+ and feminist movements met and influenced each other deeply, namely in lesbian feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on feminist historiography and memory studies, this article discusses the role the figure of the lesbian has played in the collective memory of lesbian feminism. With a focus on the expressive capacities of comics, it examines how the work revisits this figure at a time when women's and LGBTQI+ rights face a backlash led by anti-gender campaigners, some of whom draw on discourses associated with lesbian feminism. It concludes that the work challenges dominant narratives about the relationship between lesbian, queer, and trans feminism and enables a reconsideration of these movements as parts of a common political project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I engage in a discourse analysis of National Geographic's docuseries "9/11: One Day in America" to argue that the series' multi-layered effort at commemoration, geared as a long-awaited "full" telling of the 9/11 story, but committed to honoring a specific group of victims and survivors, is enabled by a disorienting temporality that raises questions about the role of national memorials and archives at this moment. Temporality is essential to the development of narrative, and with narrative a central element in the making of memory worlds, temporality cannot be underestimated as a key factor in how memories take shape. "One Day" depends on structural instantiations of time to develop its narrative as authentic memory, reflecting a paradoxical linear yet circular pattern that simultaneously authenticates and undermines the veracity of the story it tells. "One Day" transports viewers into lower Manhattan and through the events of 9/11 via a vividly illustrated timeline. But while a linear version of time in "One Day" supports the telling of survivor stories and the memorialization of the dead, the overarching effect of the timeline for viewers is circular, transporting viewers back in time to 2001 and a state of fear and confusion, forcing collective memory to exist in a repetitive temporality that excuses a turn away from history and consequences. The resulting circular mechanism for commemoration allows cultural institutions, like the ones represented in "One Day," to emphasize the past at the expense of more critical understandings of both history and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memoricide, it seems, is memory made rubble and ash. Its emblematic imagery is of scenes many would find familiar: burning ash-snow from Sarajevo's Vijecnica ; satellite images of Palmyra's missing structures; the exploding Bamiyan Buddhas. Physically altering space is understandably a highly visible tactic. However, when explicitly built into definitions, the emphasis on physical destruction has been on specific forms targeted: archival institutions, monuments, memorials and heritage sites. This article revisits memoricide as a range of converging physical, social and discursive strategies. It introduces 'everyday' memoricide – the normalisation of memory erasure as mundane practices – which ordinarily masks its intelligibility as memoricide through 'common sense' or 'greater good' discursive frames. The sacred Djab Wurrung trees, threatened by the Victorian State Government's Western Highway project, and a felled Directions Tree in particular, provide a still unfolding case study within the broader history of Australian memoricide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is commonly accepted that forgetting may serve to accomplish worthwhile goals, relevant social technologies require detailed analysis. We examined the literature on the social practices of the collective inhibition of unwanted memories. Complimenting the term 'sites of memory' introduced by Nora, we applied the term 'sites of oblivion' to the areas intentionally designed to protect visitors from specific unwanted memories associated with the disturbing affect. This study proposed a preliminary classification of the 'sites of oblivion'. This analysis identified four qualitatively distinct social politics aimed at evoking the transformation of existing sites of memory into memory-inhibiting areas. Each of these politics employs a specific psychological mechanism of memory inhibition and varies with concrete strategies to achieve the goal of not remembering. These basic high-level forgetting politics include: exploiting the natural fragility of human activity traces or destroying memorial sites, including various forms of ignoring (the 'no traces' politic); retracting attention from memory triggers to other intense stimuli (the 'switching memory to' politic); recasting 'sites of memory' into 'sites of oblivion' through functional replacement or reconceptualisation, including renaming (the 'recasting' politic); and the politic of 'hyper-evocation', that is, decreasing the probability of recall outside of memorial sites by rising the threshold of mnemonic response to those reminders that are weaker than hyper-reminders. The psychological mechanisms underlying the inhibitory mnemonic effect of 'sites of oblivion' are as follows: Pavlovian extinction, attention deployment, Pavlovian re-conditioning and Pavlovian discrimination, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss how children and grandchildren of North Korean war refugees who were displaced during the Korean War construct identity and belonging in relation to their North Korean heritage. Drawing from the concept of postmemory, I examine how their northern heritage is experienced, constructed, mediated, and even solidified across generations who did not directly experience the Korean War. Unlike existing literature that predominantly focuses on the traumatic aspects of postmemory, I found that one's construction of postmemory also encompasses positive family memories. These affirming memories exist alongside traumatic ones, countering the overdetermined paradigm of trauma across memory studies. Thus, I propose alternative ways of remembering that capture a nuanced understanding of how the second and third generations construct positive postmemories alongside the traumatic memories of their ancestors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research presents three archival studies conducted on three different databases, on the location of memorials. Study 1 compares French monuments dedicated to the Wars of 1870–1871 (defeat) and 1914–1918 (victory). We note a proportionally greater presence in public spaces of monuments dedicated to the 1914–1918 War. Study 2 concerns the memorials to political repression in the Russian Federation, erected before and after 1991 (date of promulgation of a victim rehabilitation law). Results show an increase of presence of monuments in the public space starting from 1991. Study 3 concerns the location of monuments dedicated to the Second World War in the Russian Federation. No significant variation in the locations of these monuments is observed between 1951 and 2010. The results of these studies suggest that the location of monuments could be a relevant indicator to assess the way a society views a commemorated event at a given moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the discursive strategies of the Turkish Jewish community of Çanakkale to make sense of their troubled memories resulting in a mass emigration. Considering the emphasis on silence in the present literature on the memory practices of the Jewish community, I argue that they do not simply avoid facing the past but rather refer to nostalgia as a complementary, proactive strategy. My analysis is based on the memoirs and impressions of the individual members who took part in the annual visit to Çanakkale to highlight the role of nostalgia between silence and speaking out. The critical discourse analysis of the narratives published in the newsweekly Şalom reveals that nostalgia emerges as a silence-breaker. In addition to the constructive strategy of presenting the discourses of coexistence and good-neighborhood embodied in a distinctive local identity, they propose a strategy of dismantling the figures that challenge the former by de-ethnicizing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, scholars from a broad range of disciplines have started to explore the role that emotions play in the collective memory of social movements. Against this backdrop, they have proposed that activists do not necessarily commemorate failed struggles by drawing on negative emotions such as suffering and grief. As a case in point, the interdisciplinary literature has drawn attention to the fact that the historical labour movement commemorated even events that ended in bloodshed and defeat, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, through performances and writings that evoked feelings of hope and joy. Analysing commemorative practices by the German labour movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article shows that Commune memory differed considerably in Germany. In a first step, the article shows that during the two decades following the Commune's bloody demise, German socialists remembered the Paris Commune by drawing on hatred, anger, and grief – not hope or joy. In a second step, the article demonstrates that while the 1890s did see the rise of memory practices that emphasized hope, this was a peculiar kind of hope largely detached from the historical event that was commemorated. By the turn of the century, the German labour movement had established a memory tradition that saw the Commune as a painful but necessary step in the forward march of the movement. In a short conclusion, the article explores some of the reasons why memory traditions by the German labour movement differed from the pattern detected elsewhere. In so doing, it shows that the change in the affective repertoire corresponded to a change in the political needs of the movement. The conclusion thus points to how the historical examples discussed here contributes to a better understanding of role of emotions in social movements more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of memory studies has, in recent years, experienced a 'nonhuman turn' that extends the analytical focus beyond anthropocentric functions of collective remembering. However, while this growing literature has considerably enhanced our understanding of how memories of environmental change may promote a stronger sense of connectedness with nature, the different arguments – developed mainly through critical readings of cultural texts – have yet to be investigated empirically. By means of an original survey of 1,100+ adults in Aotearoa New Zealand, the paper here provides a first step towards addressing the empirical gap in the 'nonhuman turn' literature. Two main findings emerge from this analysis. First, knowing about historical environmental change and overestimating the extent of environmental change make it more likely that individuals see themselves as part of nature. Second, the survey demonstrates that the relationship between memories of environmental change and closeness to nature interacts with wider political conflicts over how to remember the colonial past. In particular, the question of who to blame for historical environmental change shapes the effect of ecological memories in different ways, depending on whether respondents identify as European New Zealanders or Indigenous Māori. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the changes experienced by collective memory in the digital era. Contrary to the thesis that digital memory entails a new type of memory, which is radically different from the traditional conceptualization, I argue that the practice of digital memory materializes and implements the theoretical claims made by Memory Studies since the field's inception – collective memory conceived as a process, mediated and remediated by multiple media, with the participation of dynamic communities that perform rather than represent the past. In the article, I address what I propose are the following four major transformations that collective memory has undergone in the digital era: (1) the new ontology of the digital archive; (2) the shift from narrative as a privileged form of collective memory to the cultural form of the database; (3) the reconfiguration of agency, in which a distributed memory is performed by human and non-human agents in a dynamic entanglement; and (4) the shift from mnemonic objects to mnemonic assemblages, comprising persons, things, artefacts, spaces, discourses, behaviours and expressions in dynamic relatedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin America is a very fertile region for memory studies, as evidenced by the publications that range from the founding works of Elizabeth Jelin to the most recent compilation works. It is important to recognize that this consolidated field of studies has traditionally revolved around victimization processes and, more recently, transitional justice. However, it is also a scenario for the renewal of memory studies, in tune with contemporary global debates such as (1) the new generations and post-memory; (2) the redefinition of the role of the state as guarantor of official and public memories and, added to this; (3) the new place (geographical, institutional) occupied by the citizenry. Based on an assessment that recovers both the founding studies in Latin America, as well as the main contributions of research on memory and violence (with emphasis on work on transitional justice, exile and new generations), here we identify the new lines of research that are being privileged by memory studies in the region, this in order to draw a new research agenda for the field, which registers both the renewal of traditional themes (e.g. systematic investigations on the engagements of the researchers regarding issues such as transitional processes, and violence against marginalized or repressed groups; or the need to reintroduce the field of corporeity to think about issues such as gender, violence, exile) and the emergence of new problems of urgent research (the field of crises and uncertainty). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together memory studies with the emerging field of contradiction studies, in this article, I suggest the need for an alternative way of thinking about collective memory by juxtaposing the ideal of wholeness that necessarily underlies any group's identity with that of the inevitable contradiction of the plurivers. I discuss the power of the Western narrative order in regard to the Haitian Revolution and examples of mnemonic disharmony in contemporary Germany and seek to illuminate the epistemic violence constitutive of this narrative order. The article therefore interrogates memory study's epistemological foundation and the practices in which these underpinnings result. The aim is to highlight the potential of contradiction in an attempt to pluriversify responses to the past as well as future visions for the worlds we live in. Special attention is paid to the question of what it is we hope for when attempting to (scholarly) contribute to making collective memory more inclusive, and where the limitations of this might lie. The purpose of my contribution, then, is to explore the tacit imperative of harmony that often remains unchallenged in memory studies, and to propose a shift in focus, from the ways in which memory might help us understand (e.g., current clashes of identities), toward a research agenda that is considerate of its own entanglements with power, yet, at the same time, lives up to its potential to contribute to transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reminiscence bump refers to the increased recall of events from adolescence and early adulthood. It is a robust phenomenon for personal events, while the evidence for the bump has been inconsistent for public events. The present study addressed lifespan distributions of public events in a nationally representative sample of adults (N = 1200) in Turkey. We demonstrated a robust recency effect in the temporal distribution of public event memories. When we examined the bump in the most frequently reported events, the recency effect persisted. The only exception was the bump for the military coup in 1980, a relatively more distant event among the most frequent events. Findings suggested that high-impact events in Turkey's recent past may overshadow the past events. Inline, we discuss the role of the context and age distribution of the sample to explain the inconsistency in the evidence for the reminiscence bump in public events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To analyse the different appropriations of the 'Reconquest' narrative schema in Spanish collective memory, this paper proposes a study following Bartlett's method of repeated reproduction. Students from different backgrounds, within and outside of Spain, were presented historical narratives from less familiar perspectives than the traditional nationalist perspective. One week and again several months later they were asked to reproduce it. Over time their reconstructions tend to be progressively conventionalised, fitting it to the form of the traditional national historical narrative familiar to them. However, students simultaneously reflect on the term 'Reconquest' and its narrative schema. They turn around upon this schema, negotiate critical narrative elements or personalise the narrative they had read. These findings encourage further research into the complexity of schematic reconstructions and, ultimately, the reconstruction of schemas through reflection from other points of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most collective memory research to date has focused on the temporal distribution of and generational differences in public event representations while not directly addressing the conceptual relationships between different event representations. This study investigates how individuals cluster representations of public events and how sociopolitical identity changes event clustering. Participants judged the similarity of different pairs of key public events and reported their voting behavior. Using multidimensional scaling (MDS), we identified that public events were distinguished based on their political and nonpolitical characteristics; political events were further clustered based on their specific attributes (e.g. power struggles or ethnicity issues). Voting behavior introduced variations into how people clustered political public events. Our findings suggest that collective memories that are formed in relation to a historical and sociopolitical background may be better understood within a network of relationships and at the level of specific cultures/groups rather than at a larger (e.g. national) level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies how the experiences of former women political prisoners in the New Order era of Indonesia have been recollected to reproduce identity. In 1979, these women were returned to their community after a rehabilitation period of nearly 10 years. The public, which could not accept their past, attached a lingering stigma to them and continually rejected them. This article attempts to uncover the process of memory articulation and the context in which these women sought to reproduce their identity through Dialita (Di Atas Lima Puluh Tahun, Above 50 Years Old), a choir group consisting of former women political prisoners and their relatives. Dialita positioned itself as a medium for cultural reconciliation that aimed to alter public perception of the women's identity and reposition them in the country's collective memory. This is how the politics of memory work in Indonesian society, where the government has the power to decide which memories should be remembered and which should be forgotten. Dialita brought almost forgotten songs back to life because its members were not allowed to write songs while being imprisoned at correctional facilities in Bukit Duri, Plantungan, Salemba and Ambarawa. Interviews and textual interpretation have allowed us to delve deeper into the lives of these former women political prisoners, who were positioned as the main actors of a past historical event and encouraged to articulate their memories by reproducing songs as a part of their identity reproduction. The articulation process and the re-interpretation of the past helped the women shape their sense of self and, more importantly, to alter the way the public remembers the events of 1965. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a qualitative content analysis of an ideologically representative sample of influential media outlets in Spain, this article identifies three principal discursive frameworks surrounding Franco's exhumation. These frameworks expressed not only deep disagreements over the direction of Spain's regime of remembrance, but reflected deeper anxieties over the state of a democracy in crisis. More broadly, this analysis responds to calls to engage with journalistic sources in the memory studies literature, while illustrating the role of collective memory in collapsing past, present, and future in the articulation of political identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, most research has investigated people's representations of the national past and future separately and the few that examined the relationships between the two overlooked the role of the group's present. The present study aimed to replicate previous results showing an implicit trajectory of national decline among Americans within a French sample and additionally examined whether perceived societal anomie— that is, perceiving that present society is disintegrated and disregulated —would accentuate this trajectory of decline. Results first showed a positivity bias for the French past and a negativity bias for the French future; thus, replicating previous results showing an implicit trajectory of national decline in another national context. Moreover, the trajectory of decline was steeper for participants who perceived present French society as highly anomic; but only because they projected more negative national futures. Explanations for the conflicting results in the literature regarding valence biases in collective memory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, we investigated the organization of autobiographical memory in view of the Living-in-History effect, which is visible when personal memory and historical memory become intertwined. We investigated how often participants dated their own personal recollections with reference to important historical events (such as the Fall of Communism). Furthermore, we also examined whether cultural life script events served as a prominent strategy to date personal memories in our sample of 35 participants (Mage = 69.76 years, SD = 8.26). This study failed to document the Living-in-History effect, as participants mentioned only few historical events of interest to this study when dating their personal memories. In addition, supporting the Cultural Life Script theory, participants employed culturally transmitted knowledge to navigate through their autobiographical memories. We conclude that for our sample, historically defined autobiographical memories mainly develop when the specific public events affect in a dramatic manner the individuals' lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory has been a central foundation of democracy and civil society in Argentina since the first years of the military dictatorship (1976–1983) when groups occupied public spaces to protest systematic disappearances and state repression that left 30,000 victims. It has taken decades to achieve some form of justice for state terror and repression, much of that shaped by the culture of memory and accountability that hinged on embodied forms of public protest. But what happens to cultural memory when a pandemic precludes traditional forms of gathering? And what does this reveal about how Argentines renegotiate the significance of shared remembering and presence? Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Buenos Aires, this visual essay examines the significance of shared embodied practices of remembering through the lens of pandemic restrictions that invite new insights into the relationship between presence and political belonging. Rather than simply reacting to specific instances of injustice, this essay argues for the significance of cultural memory practices as fundamentally constitutive of democratic culture and civil society in Argentina as it faces new challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that Hartmut Rosa's theory of resonance provides memory activists (those actors engaged in memory politics) with both a normative justification and qualitative metric by which sites of memory may be compared and evaluated. Resonance is a plausible candidate for an assessing concept on the grounds that there is overlap between Rosa's sociological approach and the implicit appeal to resonance in the memory studies literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, researchers have endeavored to extend cultural perspectives of collective remembering by examining communicative or living historical memory (collective memories that emerge from informal communication between ordinary people). The current study examined the content and subjective evaluation of living historical memory from open-ended nominations of historical events provided by samples from 39 societies. Results showed that Western societies were dominated by living memories of terrorism, reflecting a distinctly negative climate. By contrast, many developing societies displayed a more positive climate in living memory that was rooted in events related to their nation's foundation. The current study opens up avenues for conceptualizing the role of collective remembering in shaping emotional climates that influence (or may be part of) national political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. We focus on a key moment in that process, when Republicans in the early 1980s battled other Republicans to establish King's birthday as a federal holiday and thereby distinguish a conservative position on racial inequality from that associated with southern opposition to civil rights. The victory was consequential, aiding the New Right's efforts to roll back gains on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. We use the case to explore the conditions in which political actors are able to lay claim to venerated historical figures who actually had very different beliefs and commitments. The prior popularization of the figure makes it politically advantageous to identify with his or her legacy but also makes it possible to do so credibly. As they are popularized, the figure's beliefs are made general, abstract, and often vague in a way that lends them to appropriation by those on the other side of partisan lines. Such appropriation is further aided by access to a communicative infrastructure of foundations, think tanks, and media outlets that allows political actors to secure an audience for their reinterpretation of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse and memory around AIDS have often centred on White gay cis-men in Europe and North America. This is reflected in the way the history of the virus is often told and how the memory of the disease and the fight against it is created. While gay cis men have been among the most heavily affected by the virus, widespread narratives surrounding the epidemic often blur the complexity of the experiences of and histories created by the virus and have rightly been challenged. The Schwules Museum Berlin (Queer Museum Berlin) has increasingly reflected on its function as an arsenal as well as an archive and the connected role as a 'memory maker', trying to re-actualize its founding impetus as a subcultural 'antimuseum'. Two recent exhibitions on HIV/AIDS at the museum attempted to provide a wider set of narratives and experiences beyond the already established one, diversifying the way HIV/AIDS history is told, thereby 'queering' a queer institution while exhibiting an inherently 'queer' topic. Using these two exhibitions as examples, this contribution is concerned with reflections from inside a queer cultural institution coming from the practical work of engaging with queer memory/ies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral history collections both rely on and preserve community memories, and are of importance for understanding marginalized communities, particularly when they privilege minority voices. This article draws from original, video-based oral histories conducted for the United Kingdom's national LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and others) museum, Queer Britain, focusing on an ongoing collection of oral histories organized around experiences related to the COVID pandemic. In order to protect the health of those interviewed and the interviewers, the researchers used virtual meeting software to record video interviews and utilized qualitative software to expand and support interview analysis. Specific oral history methodologies and concepts are explored, and museum studies content is briefly discussed, specifically as it relates to museums of marginalized people. Themes explored include isolation and timelessness, the impact of the pandemic on diverse LGBTQ+ communities, and HIV/AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the relationship between history, memory, archiving and trans experiences. This body of work has shown how questioning the praxis of archiving from the vantage point of trans experiences has the potential to problematise cis-heteronormative assumptions around the body, time and space and to queer the epistemological premises around what constitutes archives and archival practices. In this article, we present the experience of the project ArchiviST* – Archivi Storia Trans (Trans History Archives) which aims to create the first archive exclusively dedicated to the history of trans lives and activism in contemporary Italy. The project has been promoted by Trans Identity Movement, the most influential and long-lived trans association in Italy. Since its birth in 1979, Trans Identity Movement informally collected a substantial documentary heritage concerning trans and LGBTQIA+ history as a political practice to preserve the counter-memories of its people and movements. The ArchiviST* project carries out the inventorying and digitising of the materials, together with the collection of original video-recorded interviews with pioneering activists of the trans movement. By presenting a reflection on the process of 'reconstructing' an archive in this context, we unpack and explore some of the key issues surrounding trans archiving and collective memories in the Italian context: what counts as collective memory? What types of relationships are established between trans memories and the documents present in the archive? What memories have (not) been told, and what voices and subjects have (not) emerged as protagonists? We encourage a reflexive attitude towards the practice of trans archiving to problematise established historiographical categories, such as time, private/public, political engagement, life history and memory and to recognise the ethical and methodological challenges that such a path poses to historiography and archive research in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the distinctions in modern historiography is that between collective memory and history. Although ideal historical research is presented as objective and driven by the search for accuracy, collective memory is nearly always distorted by the current group's needs. In the current study, we assess whether common people use this professional distinction and whether these two concepts are used by the general population. Our findings are based on several different lines of quantitative studies with a total sample size of 3949: two representative Polish samples, a study of the collective memory of Oświęcim inhabitants and one representative study of inhabitants of six Polish cities. The findings show that laypeople distinguish between three different forms of historical understanding, corresponding to the (1) realistic view of history (history as a search for truth), (2) instrumental view of history (history as a construction in the service of the group's current needs) and (3) relativistic view of history (disbelief in the possibility of historical cognition). The meta-analysis of correlations revealed that instrumental lay theory was positively related to the nationalistic in-group identity that glorifies the in-group. By contrast, realistic theory was positively related to patriotism – a form of in-group attachment that is open to criticism. The realistic theory was positively related, whereas the instrumental view was negatively related to the expressed interest in history. Moreover, the instrumental view of history was positively related to the explicit denial of the value of historical heritage and a strong focus on the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 40 years since Chile and the United Kingdom became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working-class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertación, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of 'capitalist realism' (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin's 'empty homogeneous time'. This article explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this 'presentism': the 1973 coup in Chile and the 1984–1985 Miners' Strike in the United Kingdom. We argue that the use of 'living history' or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article first examines the contrast between popular remembering and the official presentation of Yugoslav socialist past in Slovenia. We examine the discursive patterns in political dignitaries' declarations and reconstruct popular remembering as it emerges from the existing research. We focus on theories that conceptualize positive popular attitudes towards socialist past with the notion of 'nostalgia'. Following the ways how researchers overcome the difficulties of the 'Yugonostalgia' approach, we note that they do not take into account the embeddedness of the positive achievements of socialism into the overall fabric of socialist system. According to our hypothesis, this omission induces the researchers to overestimate the present social and political impact of positive attitudes to socialist past. Furthermore, social struggles in which researchers are engaged seem to raise barriers to scientific practice. This study attempts to contribute to the project of Yugoslav memory studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute conversation between a research participant and a researcher. The talk in the interaction concerns the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and concepts from interactional sociology and linguistic ethnography, the article demonstrates that people know different cultural narratives about the same past event and are able to move between those narratives when the interactional context requires them to. The combination of micro-discourse analysis with ethnographic detail provides an insight in the entanglement of general cultural meanings and specific interactional dynamics when people attribute meaning to the past. The findings and methodological framework presented in this article also engage in a dialogue with some fundamental critiques on the field of memory studies. These include, among others, the need to connect the micro, meso, and macro, and the individual with the social, and the urge to actively develop and think through methods in memory studies research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The date 1 July 2013 marked the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands, and though the Dutch memory of slavery had previously been largely silenced, the interests of the Afro-Dutch community and recent racial tension transformed the anniversary into a national commemoration. By looking at the emergence of narrative themes and agents in mainstream news media, this article asks whether the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands provided an opportunity for the proliferation of counter-narratives and the inclusion of ethnic memories of slavery in the official narrative. This analysis of 222 newspaper articles shows that 2013 was a turning point in the utilization of slavery memory. The narrative transitioned from an abolitionist memorial regime, telling only of the end of slavery, to a victimary regime that allowed for more open discussion on the realities and lasting consequences of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although social scientists have examined how political speeches may help forge and/or shape collective memories, they have done so with little to no input from psychologists. We address this deficit, demonstrating how a modified version of a well-established and empirically derived psychological phenomenon—socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting—helps explain the mnemonic consequences associated with political speeches, in this case, the Belgian King's 2012 summer speech. To this end, we analyzed the responses of 43 French speakers and 49 Dutch speakers. Of these individuals, 35 attended to the speech (16 French speakers; 19 Dutch speakers). Our results suggest that the Belgian King's speech induced French-speaking Belgians who attended the speech to recall less information related to what the King mentioned in the speech. We found no such deficit for Dutch-speaking Belgians. Rather, the Dutch-speaking Belgians exhibited a trend toward greater recall of related and unrelated information when attending relative to not attending to the speach. These results bolster the importance of including a psychological approach in the study of collective memories and the moderating role of social identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All forms of collective memory embody attempts at meaning-making - efforts to integrate experience and provide a coherent foundation for individual and collective identities. However, different modes of collective memory have different meaning-making potentials. In this article, I will assess three modes of remembering, namely folk, commemorative and mediatised memory, from the perspective of how they generate integrative meaning. Each of these modes of remembrance will be examined through the prism of a case study examining the nature of the memories associated with a specific lieux de memoire. I will suggest that over time, memory becomes progressively 'unanchored' from localised contexts due to its increasing technological and institutional mediation and that this has important implications for the depth and kind of meaning it provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates cultures of digital memory and forgetting in the European Union. The article first gives some background to key debates in media memory studies, before going on to analyse the shaping of European Commission and European Union initiatives in relation to Google's activities from the period 2004–present. The focus of inquiry for the discussion of memory is the Google Books project and Europeana, a database of digitized cultural collections drawn from European museums, libraries and archives. Attention is then given to questions of forgetting by exploring the tension between Google's search and indexing mechanisms and the right to be forgotten. The article ends by reflecting on the scale of the shift in contemporary cultures of memory and forgetting, and considers how far European regulation enables possible interventions in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents and discusses the interdisciplinary, collaborative and participatory research project Bieżenki. Thematically, the project is devoted to the history of the so-called bieżeństwo – a migration of people from eastern Poland during the First World War, forced by the retreating Russian Army, when the Germans broke through the eastern frontline in 1915. The stories of those refugees, among whom were a number of Rus' peasants, and within that group, women with children (the term bieżenki signifies female war refugees), make up a crucial part of the regional history that has been largely absent from public knowledge and historical discourse. Methodologically, the project is based on participatory theatre that engages non-artists both as content providers, and on-stage performers. Theatrical practice has been used to collect the marginalised memories of bieżeństwo (as they are often kept and transmitted within family circles), and present them to the wider public in the form of theatrical performance. The project has also resulted in a theoretical concept of the assemblage of memory, inspired by and grounded in the creative process, which is briefly sketched out at the end of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of victims' collective memory in post-conflict Colombia is crucial to understanding the violent past and its social consequences. This article argues that victims' initiatives, such as the March of Light, are facilitating an active role of local communities in the configuration of their memory regimes after the war. Addressing a participative action research approach, this article's significance rests in the idea that Colombian victims' groups from Eastern Antioquia are establishing three particular types of collective memory developing the March of Light every week. It establishes that this effort is a powerful instrument to claim truth and reparation in Colombia, helping the ongoing process of transitional justice in the country. It demonstrates that the tension between official and non-official narratives of collective memory is an essential part of transitional justice scenarios in which the clash of values defines positions of power, visibility and recognition inside contexts of social transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technology has brought critical changes to mnemonic practices in China, such as the empowerment of social groups to discover previously underrepresented historical accounts and produce alternative historical narratives. This article examines the mnemonic practices of Han-centrism, a type of ethnic and cultural nationalist movement based on the Chinese Internet. It analyzes how Han-centrist netizens reinterpret national history through their efforts to rediscover forgotten historical narratives of glory and trauma. It suggests that digital technology in China facilitates the emergence of online groups that are dedicated to the struggle for "historical truth" and social-cultural changes, motivated by a crisis of identity. Their mnemonic practices may be partly tolerated by the authoritarian state under some conditions. However, given China's complicated and conflictual history, such online groups can easily turn the Internet into a battlefield of nationalism. This article highlights the confusion and contestation of memory and identity in contemporary China and the role of digital technology in the long battle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Origin stories are particularly influential collective memories, establishing a society in the minds of its members. National collective memories are frequently conceived as being shared by all members of the country, but subnational groups may differ in their images of the group's past. Surveying 2000 Americans, we examined political and religious differences in foundational events selected for America's origins. While there was considerable agreement across religious and political affiliations for the most important events, there were also critical differences. While all participants demonstrated a marked positivity bias in their origin stories, conservative participants more frequently omitted foundational atrocities from America's origin story, and thus had the most positive stories. Secular participants were most likely to begin America with the independent state, whereas religious participants frequently began America with earlier colonization events. Origin stories accord with varying images of America and American identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The iaioflautas movement, which emerged in the course of the indignados protests in Spain in 2011, is one of the few social movements that explicitly organize around a "grandparents' identity." This article analyzes the movement against the historical backdrop of the Spanish transición, in particular the characteristic absence of transitional justice and the pacto del olvido —the 'pact of oblivion' regarding the political violence of the civil war and the dictatorship. I argue, first, that the emergence of the movement indicates a general shift in the memory debate in Spain, problematizing the memory of transición itself against the backdrop of the crisis. The iaioflautas organize as active historical witnesses to support the younger protesters' mobilizations, not least by testifying to their historical legacy, that is the struggle for democracy. They thus draw on the hegemonic transition narrative and reframe it at the same time, echoing the indignados' slogan "Real Democracy Now." Second, I show that the iaioflautas' explicit organization around a generational identity on the one hand re-organizes this generational unit of activists that for long had been cast aside from public memory in Spain, while on the other hand it facilitates intergenerational transmission of collective memory and repertoires of contention within the indignados movement. In addition, the concomitant "family narrative" of generativity, that is, of caring for the younger generations, allows addressing a much broader audience, thus adapting to the constraints of the arena, in avoiding the acerbic political divisions that usually characterize an engagement with historical memory in this particular post-civil-war and post-dictatorship context. Third, the iaioflautas offer an example of "remembering hope," that is, they pass on their own experiences of solidarity, agency, and democratic opportunities in order to encourage the younger generations' protest and political imaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the way history is invoked in discussions about the racial achievement gap in three progressive cities in the United States. It considers how community members and institutions have tried to act as keepers of collective memory—and to subvert that collective through counter-memories—through various public communication channels. Using interviews and textual analysis, this study builds an argument about how K-12 racial achievement gaps are covered with a present-mindedness that obscures the historic social, cultural, and economic forces that created opportunity disparities between student groups. The journalism on these disparities, with its limited historical contextualization, reifies the dominant progressive ideology in all of these cities. This study found that in place of traditional media and any formal historicizing, city officials, activists, and alternative online publications stepped in to "remember" in sometimes more complex but often polemic ways that created a politicized, divisive bricolage of historical interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature suggests that the Spanish Flu—despite the devastation it caused—suffers from social amnesia, this article begs to differ. Building on the multiplicity of manners in which the past maintains itself in the present and specifically focusing on Erll's distinction between remembrance and knowledge as two poles of collective memory, we shed light on the collective memory of the Spanish Flu in its entirety. First, our analysis recognizes COVID-19 as a catalyst of the remembrance of the Spanish Flu. Second, it suggests that the perceived social amnesia attached to the Spanish Flu stems from overlooking the mark it left on the sphere of knowledge. The article addresses the need to recognize the uniqueness and importance of the knowledge pole in assessing collective memory, and exposes the dynamics and potential relationships shared by the poles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the Black Lives Matter protests and calls to remove Confederate statuary in Richmond, Virginia, during the summer of 2020, the History Is Illuminating project constructed public signs that replicated the traditional historical markers used throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. The signs were placed along Richmond's historic Monument Avenue in conversation with the still-standing Confederate monuments. They challenged the monuments' representation of public memory by re-introducing narratives about prominent Black Richmonders and informing readers of the Jim Crow legislation that enabled the monuments to be constructed and venerated. This edited and condensed interview with organizers from the project describes the multiple crises of collective memory that public historians confront in the American South, as well as the strategies the History Is Illuminating project used to counter dominant narratives about public memory. Finally, the interview highlights the importance of community action and a multiplicity of public memory projects in order to ensure a democratic approach to collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how political actors appropriate the past by utilizing collective traumas for their populist cause. We demonstrate how the Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Turkey and the oppression of military interventions, for which it served as a backyard, became a tool for the AKP's (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-Justice and Development Party) populist agenda. Through a particular narration of history embedded in the museum, the AKP aimed to forge an internal frontier within the society between an envisioned homogenous body of people on the one hand and the elite on the other. Situating itself as the people's authentic voice against this elite, the AKP tried to further its popular appeal and legitimize its extension of power. What appeared as coming to terms with the past was instead the instrumentalization of the past for a singular political agenda, eager to remove the complexities and pluralism of the past for the sake of telling a politically useful story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remembering the War of Resistance against Japan is central to China's memory and identity politics. By focusing on the production of China's War of Resistance television dramas, this study analyzes how collective memory is shaped by market actors and their interactions with the state. The first substantive section investigates how commercial media and the state cooperate in the production of War of Resistance television dramas. The second explicates how market actors undermine the state's ideological imperatives by adding entertainment content to repackage war memory, which then conflicts with the propagandistic task. This study contributes to introducing the market factor to research on the remembering of War of Resistance in China and enriching the political economy of memory approach by examining an authoritarian state-capitalist case, which is centrally characterized by these cooperative and conflictual relations between the state and the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analysed 487 news stories in 30 anniversary editions of a newspaper in Hong Kong, with an aim to systematically review what has been recorded and remembered about the commemoration on June 4th every year. Through analysis of recurring themes, the case sheds light on the ideological packages embedded in news stories, while also addressing emerging questions about anniversary journalism and collective memory. How Hong Kong remembers 1989 is a unique case in anniversary journalism. Contrary to the impression about commemoration, this study finds that both the quantity and the importance of the anniversary coverage increases over time. It is also found that these practices, while adhering to journalistic norms and routines, contributed to an increasingly stable theme about the remembrance. Remembering 1989, as well as remembering the commemoration, hence the values, emotional imprint, and moral clarity it comes to represent, is becoming equally important over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of centennials focus on explaining the social and political contexts for such commemorations. This paper develops an alternative, naturalistic theory of these long-range anniversaries. The paper starts by describing the value of a naturalistic account of complex cultural formations, and by reviewing basic demographic and physiological facts underlying centennial observances. Next, the paper provides a novel taxonomy of three central social functions of centennials, highlighting their roles as standards of greatness, mirrors of progress, and spurs to renovation. Each of these functions reflects the existence of certain predictable limits to human lifespans. The paper concludes by considering some transformations in form and function that centennials might undergo in a potential future of extended longevity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective references are of crucial significance for the individual memory. This article discusses the formation and transformation of intergenerational memory in situations where a hegemonic national memory discourse provides the only available reference point. On the basis of a biographical and multigenerational single case study of one family, the article traces the constitution of an intergenerational memory which is marked by the fact that, in their remembering, the family members' only reference point is an Austrian national memory that disowns resistance to Nazism and downplays the role of Austrians in Nazi crimes. The fact that family members have no access to an alternative collective memory that acknowledges the resistance has a crucial influence on the intergenerational memory: the role of resistance in the family history is depoliticized and dehistoricized, and the Nazis are relieved of responsibility for their actions. Along this empirical finding, the article discusses the significance of the entanglement and figuration of collective reference, individual memory and intergenerational memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family archives have become the source of nostalgic 1.5 and second-generation diasporic cultural work as artists seeking to understand their family histories and to negotiate liminal identities remediate private home movies, photos, and postmemorial narratives. The liminal position of these artists leads to imaginative remediations that dwell in what could have been, prompting a subjunctive nostalgia for a future past cut short by revolution and war. By focusing on the online circulation of remediated pre-Revolutionary Iranian family photos and home movies, I demonstrate that digitized images of this particular time-space (the chronotope of pre-Revolution Iran) have become an evocative site of memory for the Iranian diasporic postgeneration. When these images are remediated through art and circulated digitally online, they move horizontally across the postgeneration along with the subjunctive nostalgia they prompt, creating opportunities for affiliation and recognition that contribute to diasporic collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship explores the possibility of a global collective memory in which networked individuals transiting national, class, and ethnic boundaries create commonality from shared difference. Yet, the public past's representation remains influenced by powerful entities such as governments and corporations, and resources made available, particularly by the popular culture industry, will likely shape globally shared memories. This study documents an instance of commercially mediated global memory, showing how Captain America: The First Avenger revised the original comic's World War II backdrop to appeal to global audiences who would have been dire enemies during the period the film depicts. Scholars positing cosmopolitan memory might agree there is value in representing the world coming together to defeat a common enemy. Yet the film also relativizes historical depravities by claiming that real historical actors are not as bad as they seem and by suggesting that such acts are not truly ours but rather visited upon us by non-human strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, unveiled in Berlin in 2008 at the edge of the Tiergarten park, forms part of an impressive commemorative landscape. It caused considerable controversy from the outset due to its twofold intention of recognizing past repression and creating a symbol against the exclusion of gays and lesbians. The article departs from these debates and describes the polyphonous field of visitor reactions to the memorial. It is based empirically on expert interviews, covert observation, and almost one hundred "express interviews" with visitors. The findings suggest that the relationships between visitors and the memorial are shaped by a pronounced aesthetic attitude. Identity-related visitor reactions center on the video installation inside the memorial, which depicts an endless male-to-male kiss. The article shows how visitors derive meaning from the memorial regardless of the superficiality of their encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]