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The article results from the creation and implementation of a 1-year online Memory Studies Certificate Program at UCLouvain (Belgium). It describes the program designed by a team of researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds (i.e. sociology, political science, psychology, philosophy) and with different pedagogical styles. After this description, the article highlights key lessons informed by data from lecturers' internal discussions and a survey involving the pioneer student cohort enrolled during the 2021–2022 academic year. This experience shows the importance of teaching as a way of contributing to field of Memory studies. As a counterpoint to the relentless publish-or-perish ethos, which often favors expedited dissemination of fragmented knowledge, creating a study program necessitates deep understanding and cohesive dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the processes of remembering and identity formation in a present-day mnemonic community consisting of former inmates of a total government institution for abandoned juveniles in Brazil's countryside during the Dictatorship Regime. Through the sharing of their remembrances, they mutually shaped their life's stories in narratives of triumph. For dealing with the empirical data, we acknowledged that memory is a complex phenomenon which must be approached in an interdisciplinary way, considering concepts draw from Cognitive Sciences to Sociology. First, we have collected their remembrances on Social Media, in-depth interviews, and fieldwork over 4 years. Second, we analyzed the dynamics of validation ; the network of authorities ; and the emotional regimes among the former inmates that determined what is selected and interpreted as collective understandings of the past. We took a relational and processual sociological approach for analyzing how collaborative identity-mnemonic processes are also triggered, supported, and built by the material and cultural surrounding within mnemonic communities. For that, we assume a "distributed memory", and " distributed self" conceptions. Finally, we show how divergent understandings of their past are not validated within their community and consequently dismissed from their narratives of triumph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the main concepts and ontological status of memory within Social Sciences. Firstly, we highlight the main insights and contributions of Maurice Halbwachs' theory of collective memory and, secondly, we draw the further developments by the Memory Studies. We point out some conceptual issues within these works regarding memory's ontological status. Finally, we suggest a new avenue of interpretation for the phenomenon of memory from a sociological standpoint by (i) considering Cognitive Sciences contributions on the definition of "memory" and (ii) devising a proper social ontology for this kind of definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the biological evolution. Topics include considered to denote limits of human biological cognition in which further increases in capacity are constrained by the neuronal system processing speed and memory storage; and determines that cognitive assemblages impeded by views of computational media that position them as calculators without ability to create, disseminate, or participate in activities.

In a highly mediated world, iconic sporting moments are repeatedly relived, with their significance reinforced by a series of media montages. These narratives form the basis of a series of collective, shared memories within a society. Despite the power that collective memories may have, iconic sporting moments may also have private significance for an individual. In this paper, we examine these, what might be termed "mental postcards." The study was conducted within the West Midlands of the UK, with participants asked to identify their most memorable moment as a spectator of sport. Though respondents' accounts were idiosyncratic, highly individualized, and covered a range of sports, thematic coding revealed four specific themes: "What a Hero," "Never Say Die," "Being There," and "We Won." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how Elisian ideas on memory could have changed the history of Memory Studies ideas. The history of the phenomenon of memory inside the sociological field reflects the foundational dichotomies of the discipline: macro × micro dimensions and biological × social realms. Many of the hurdles and discussions of Memory Studies still lie upon these dichotomies. Although Elias has never investigated this topic properly, he has a rich discussion on relationality, interdisciplinarity, and processuality. These three aspects would dissolve many of the actual hurdles faced by Memory Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We collected behavioral evidence to support the hypothesis that video game conditions have varying influences on hippocampus-dependent memory. Results indicate that participants who played in the video game conditions with clear reward mechanisms performed better on a declarative memory task than those who played in the video game conditions without reward mechanisms. Those who reported spending more time gaming weekly also performed the task better than those who reported spending less time gaming weekly, suggesting that gaming might have short-term and long-term effects on the hippocampus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Philosopher Jeffrey Barash seeks to clarify the concept of collective memory, which has taken on wide‐ranging meanings in contemporary scholarship. Returning to the original insight of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs during the 1920s, he grounds the concept in the living social memory of the present, whose sphere is widened by its capacity to draw upon a past beyond its ken through the symbolization of its remembrance. He offers two preliminary propositions: first, there is a history to the way philosophers have contextualized collective memory through the ages; second, there is a politics in the transmission of collective memory, highly visible in the uses of memory by mass media in the contemporary age. He builds his argument around four interrelated interpretations concerning: the ever more circumscribed role attributed to collective memory in the passage from antiquity into modernity; the dependence of collective memory upon living memory; the rising power of media to mold collective memory to present purposes; and historical understanding vis‐à‐vis evocation of collective memory as oppositional ways of accessing the past. I close with commentary that places Barash's philosophical interpretation within the context of contemporary historiographical practice, with particular attention to the scholarship of French historian Pierre Nora on the French national memory, and that of German scholars Jan and Aleida Assmann on the preservation and transmission of memorable cultural legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary analysis of the play "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare is presented. It examines the theme of and depiction of memory in the play with particular attention given to the political connotations of the concept.

Background: Retention of participants in cohort studies is important for validity. One way to promote retention is by sending a persuasive cover letter with surveys. The study aimed to compare the effectiveness of a covering letter containing social pressure with a standard covering letter on retention in a health cohort study. Social pressure involves persuading people to behave in a certain way by the promise that their actions will be made know to others. We implemented a mild form of social pressure, where the recipient was told that information about whether they responded to the current survey would be noted by the research team and printed on future correspondence from the research team to the recipient.Methods: The design was an embedded randomised controlled retention trial, conducted between July 2015 and April 2016 in Salford, UK. Participants in the host health cohort study were eligible. They received either: (1) a covering letter with two consecutive surveys (sent six and twelve months after recruitment), containing a social pressure intervention; or (2) a matching letter without the social pressure text. The primary outcome was retention in the host study, defined as return of both surveys. Randomisation was computer-generated, with stratification by household size. Participants were blinded to group assignment. Researchers were blinded for outcome ascertainment.Results: Adults (n = 4447) aged over 65 years, with a long-term condition and enrolled in the host study, were randomly allocated to receive a social pressure covering letter (n = 2223) or control (n = 2224). All 4447 participants were included in the analysis. Both questionnaires were returned by 1577 participants (71%) sent the social pressure letters and 1511 (68%) sent control letters, a risk difference of 3 percentage points (adjusted odds ratio = 1.16 (95% confidence interval = 1.02-1.33)).Conclusion: A mild form of social pressure made a small but significant improvement in retention of older adults in a health cohort study. Investigation of social pressure across other research contexts and stronger social pressure messages is warranted.Trial Registration: The host cohort study, the Comprehensive Longitudinal Assessment of Salford Integrated Care (CLASSIC) study is associated with the CLASSIC PROTECTs trial, which is registered on the ISRCTN registry.Trial Registration Number: ISRCTN12286422 . Date of registration 19 June 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although recent work suggests that opposite-sex facial attractiveness is less salient in memory when individuals are in a committed romantic relationship, romantic relationship quality can vary over time. In light of this, we tested whether activating concerns about romantic relationship quality strengthens memory for attractive faces. Partnered women were exposed briefly to faces manipulated in shape cues to attractiveness before either being asked to think about a moment of emotional closeness or distance in their current relationship. We measured sensitivity in memory for faces as the extent to which they recognized correct versions of studied faces over versions of the same person altered to look either more or less-attractive than their original (i.e., studied) version. Contrary to predictions, high relationship quality strengthened hit rate for faces regardless of the sex or attractiveness of the face. In general, women's memories were more sensitive to attractiveness in women, but were biased toward attractiveness in male faces, both when responding to unfamiliar faces and versions of familiar faces that were more attractive than the original male identity from the learning phase. However, findings varied according to self-rated attractiveness and a psychometric measure of the quality of their current relationship. Attractive women were more sensitive to attractiveness in men, while their less-attractive peers had a stronger bias to remember women as more-attractive and men as less-attractive than their original image respectively. Women in better-quality romantic relationships had stronger positive biases toward, and false memories for, attractive men. Our findings suggest a sophisticated pattern of sensitivity and bias in women's memory for facial cues to quality that varies systematically according to factors that may alter the costs of female mating competition ('market demand') and relationship maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The materialization of memory is one way in which the past becomes a powerful agent for negotiating the present. Today in Botswana, archaeological sites have become sites of memory where ancestors have been invoked for healing in response to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. This paper concentrates on one site, Khubu la Dintša, where a local community practiced an ancestral healing ceremony, phekolo, as a way to restore spiritual balance. Told through a set of narratives that integrate ethnographic interviews with one of the former church elders, Russia, the article chronicles the trajectory of the church, the perceived power and active role of the ancestors in this ceremony, and the complex web of morality and practicality in which alternative narratives emerge during a time of social disruption and later fall apart. This paper complements the others in this issue by focusing on how memory, place, time, and material culture are recursively engaged: a process that includes formal and accepted to marginal and even ephemeral viewpoints and holds lessons for how we as archaeologists approach and curate the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to offer a detailed explication of collectively enacted analytical and sense-making practices in participatory research. The co-production of knowledge is central to the methodological integrity of participatory research, but capturing the shared and collaborative processes through which meaning is made; particularly the analytical practices, can be difficult to untangle. A participatory project that employed memory work techniques is presented to illustrate and examine these dynamic processes ‘in action’. Three issues that merit careful consideration in enacting collective analytical practices are identified and discussed; firstly the negotiation of tension between forms of organic and more structured forms of analytical exploration, secondly reflexive engagement with power relationships and diversity in making sense of data, and finally addressing the utility of the analysis as an important aspect of participatory work. The paper contributes to an ongoing conversation concerning the challenges and possibilities for collaborative knowledge generation in participatory practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the intersection between food, recollection and Irish migrants’ reconstructions of their housing pathways in the three English cities of Leicester (East Midlands), Sheffield (South Yorkshire) and Manchester (North). Previous studies have acknowledged more implicitly the role of memory in representing the Irish migrant experience in England. Here, we adopt a different stance. We explore the mnemonic power of food to encode, decode and recode Irish men’s reconstructions of their housing pathways in England when constructing and negotiating otherness. In doing so, we apply a ‘Proustian anthropological’ approach in framing the men’s representations of their formative residential experiences in the boarding houses of the three English cities during the 1950s and 1960s are examined. The extent to which food provided in the boarding houses was used as an instrument of discipline and control is examined. The relevance of food related acts of resistance, food insecurity and acts of hedonic meat-centric eating in constructing the men’s sociocultural identity are also explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Las ciencias sociales han experimentado, desde mediados del siglo XX, varios giros epistemológicos, culturales y políticos en la forma de producir el conocimiento social. Sin lugar a dudas, los de mayor impacto han sido el "giro lingüístico" y el "giro cultural". En este artículo reflexionamos, sin embargo, sobre el "giro hacia el pasado" que ocurre en el último cuarto del siglo XX. Éste giro repercute en el procesamiento y trámite del pasado, además de situar en la escena pública una preocupación cultural y política por el recuerdo, el olvido y la memoria en las sociedades occidentales.The social sciences have experienced since the mid-twentieth century several turns epistemological, cultural and political in way to produce social knowledge. Undoubtedly, the most impact was the "linguistic turn" and the "cultural turn". In this article we reflect, however, about the "turn toward the past" that occurs in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This turn affects the processed and handling of the past as well as placing on the public stage a special cultural and political concern by remembrance, forgetfulness and memory in Western societies.

The ability to learn and remember about the surrounding environment is crucial for the survival of organisms in their natural habitats. Adults of numerous fish species have been shown to display sophisticated behaviour related to learning and memory. This study deals with testing learning abilities among juveniles (10 wks old) of zebrafish ( Danio rerio) through a simple task of finding food. We compared the performance of juveniles from two populations, a wild collected from a natural habitat and an aquarium-bred purchased from a pet shop, reared in bare environment (lacking visual cues). Additionally, we also tested the effect of early habitat enrichment on the performance among juveniles of the aquarium-bred population. The experiments involved training fishes to solve a simple maze (with a food reward at the end) and testing their memory. Learning was measured based on the time taken to complete the task (performance time) of finding food in the maze-arena across repeated trials. Our results showed that juveniles from the two populations possessed significantly different learning abilities. There were population differences in exploratory tendency and time taken to accomplish the task. However, when memory was tested based on performance time between training and test day, individuals (from both populations) were found to be poor at memorizing learnt tasks. On the other hand, juveniles (belonging to aquarium-bred population) reared in spatially complex environments displayed higher rates of learning and were capable of remembering learnt tasks better than their counterparts from bare environments. This study thus demonstrates the importance of rearing conditions and natural ecology in ontogenetic development of learning and memory functions among zebrafish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the University of Latvia. History / Latvijas Universitātes Žurnāls. Vēsture is the property of University of Latvia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article brings together recent scholarship on the re-memorializing of World War Two and fascism across Europe, particularly in the Italian context, and historical analysis of the British-Italian experience of the war and preceding growth of fascism. Building on Ugolini's 2011 questioning of whether the Italian-Scottish community has been romanticized, it proposes a new line of inquiry into the ways in which the changing memories are articulated in cultural production, focusing on a comparative analysis of Italian-Welsh and Italian-Scottish writing in a sustained way for the first time. Drawing on Bakhtin's (2002) concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia, the article analyses whether the voices which populate recent texts permit the emergence of a multiplicity of languages and ideologies, challenging the dominant narrative of the British-Italian experience of interwar fascistization and World War Two that has prevailed since 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that influenced childhood active free play. Participants were 13 young adults who resided in one western Canadian city. They took part in semi-structured and walk-along interviews during which they were asked about their memories and experiences of play. Analysis showed that, whereas parental restrictions and safety concerns were limiting factors, a sense of community and safety in numbers facilitated their involvement in active free play. However, the young adults thought these factors had since become eroded from modern society. We concluded a reduced sense of perceived safety exists because there are fewer eyes on where children play. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quantifying attention to social stimuli during the viewing of complex social scenes with eye tracking has proven to be a sensitive method in the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders years before average clinical diagnosis. Rhesus macaques provide an ideal model for understanding the mechanisms underlying social viewing behavior, but to date no comparable behavioral task has been developed for use in monkeys. Using a novel scene-viewing task, we monitored the gaze of three rhesus macaques while they freely viewed well-controlled composed social scenes and analyzed the time spent viewing objects and monkeys. In each of six behavioral sessions, monkeys viewed a set of 90 images (540 unique scenes) with each image presented twice. In two-thirds of the repeated scenes, either a monkey or an object was replaced with a novel item (manipulated scenes). When viewing a repeated scene, monkeys made longer fixations and shorter saccades, shifting from a rapid orienting to global scene contents to a more local analysis of fewer items. In addition to this repetition effect, in manipulated scenes, monkeys demonstrated robust memory by spending more time viewing the replaced items. By analyzing attention to specific scene content, we found that monkeys strongly preferred to view conspecifics and that this was not related to their salience in terms of low-level image features. A model-free analysis of viewing statistics found that monkeys that were viewed earlier and longer had direct gaze and redder sex skin around their face and rump, two important visual social cues. These data provide a quantification of viewing strategy, memory and social preferences in rhesus macaques viewing complex social scenes, and they provide an important baseline with which to compare to the effects of therapeutics aimed at enhancing social cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to deepen the theoretical debate about the relationship between image and memory, from a consideration of some research experiences mediated by the production of ethnographic films. I reflect about film as a privileged means to conduct ethnographies of duration, resuming the debate on ways of conceiving the relationship between anthropology and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the assumption that the social management of historical time is a powerful tool in the political definition of reality, this paper analyzes how the history of the Romanian people has been periodized through the course of time. The central argument states that the partitioning system used to periodize the past harbors a hidden agenda, or a particular ideological „implicature”, that can be brought to light by analyzing the temporal watersheds selected as defining moments in the history of that community. The paper analyzes the social logic of periodization operating within the Romania national history textbooks, revealing how socio-political conditions determine the temporal structuring of the past. Moreover, it shows how social change, and especially the change of the socio-political regime, leads to a revertebration of the past’s symbolic backbone. Dramatic social and political change results in reconfiguring the formal structure of the collective consciousness concerning the past, within which specific events of Romanian history acquire their meaning. In conclusion, the study shows that, although resorting to a system of periodization is indeed a cognitive prerequisite for understanding the past, the reality of the past does not come with an already-there articular structure, so that „carving the (past’s) reality at its joints”, as Plato put it, is not a possibility.

This paper looks at the role of memory in exploring multiple meanings of place, and its active empowering role in participatory planning processes. A team of scholars from the Planning for the Environment with Communities Laboratory at Tel Aviv University's Department of Geography and Human Environment (PECLAB) was invited by the Bat Yam municipality to initiate a participatory process with residents of Meo'not Yam Neighbourhood to formulate a consensual renewal plan. During the project's three years (2010–2013) dozens of meetings and in-depth interviews with residents were held, as well as surveys conducted to understand the residents' sense of place and wishes for their neighbourhood. One of the main methods was to remember and discuss the neighbourhood's past, with reference to its future development. This discussion is the focus of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Public Act of Acknowledgment of International Responsibility and Recovery of the Memory of María Claudia García de Gelman held in the Uruguayan parliament on 21 March 2012 through a theoretical framework of memory narratives. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Uruguay to hold the Public Act as part of its February 2011 ruling in the Gelman v. Uruguay case, which condemned its failure to investigate and prosecute individuals responsible for disappearing María Claudia García de Gelman and illegally adopting her baby daughter Macarena, while denying her knowledge of her true identity for over two decades. The Public Act was a memorialising event intended as an act of reparation, which also triggered irruptions of memory in Uruguay, resurfacing memory debates and discussions about the recent past of dictatorship and violence. The Public Act exposed once again the continued antagonisms between memory narratives of violence and justice that have existed in the Uruguayan political and social landscape since 1985. While the Act was an expression of the "state terrorism" narrative, its unfolding resulted in the resurfacing of narratives of "war" and "two demons" in the social and political arenas and of new interpretations of these narratives in light of events and politics in 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commemorations and reparations are central elements of the transitional justice agenda. The inclusion of memory-related measures among the steps that states are expected to take along the transitional process has been progressively translated from the transitional justice domain to the language of international law. Judicial and quasi-judicial human rights instances have required states to make and undertake memorials, commemorations and public acts of remembrance, both as an instrument of reparation for the individual victim and as a mechanism to warn against the repetition of the same abuses in the future. As a result of this trend, memory-related measures have progressively become part of the state obligation to provide reparations to victims. The inclusion of memory-related measures in the scope of the international obligation to repair, however, raises some thorny issues. This review of the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in relation to memory-related orders and analysis of the case of the memorial El Ojo que Llora in Peru critically assesses the emerging trend of using memory-related initiatives as measures of reparation determined by judicial organs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison literature (littérature carcérale or adab al-sujun) has shed light on censured dimensions of Moroccan postcolonial history. By sharing their personal memories, former political prisoners have triggered a debate on state violence under Hassan II (1961-1999). This exploration of the gendered and relational dimensions of violence and testimony draws on the published memoirs and interviews of Nour-Eddine Saoudi and Fatna El Bouih, two former Marxist-Leninist political prisoners. Specifically, it identifies the means by which Saoudi and El Bouih theorised their personal experience to denounce the system of repression in Morocco. Their testimonies illustrate the role of memory as a transformative site of agency and political imagination, exhibiting hope for a different future by encouraging Moroccans to engage with their dark past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forgiveness is considered to play a key role in the maintenance of social relationships, the avoidance of unnecessary conflict, and the ability to move forward with one’s life. But why is it that some people find it easier to forgive and forget than others? In the current study, we explored the supposed relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. In an initial session, 30 participants imagined that they were the victim in a series of hypothetical incidents and indicated whether or not they would forgive the transgressor. Following a standard think/no-think procedure, in which participants were trained to think or not to think about some of these incidents, more forgetting was observed for incidents that had been forgiven following no-think instructions compared with either think or baseline instructions. In contrast, no such forgetting effects emerged for incidents that had not previously been forgiven. These findings have implications for goal-directed forgetting and the relationship between forgiveness and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers normative dimensions of the memory of Ukrainians and the problem related to the post soviet model of memory in Ukrainian society. The author emphasizes the social and cultural determinants of the process of formation and development of soviet model of memory, its conceptualization in the Soviet and Post soviet world. The analysis is centered on the clash of European and post soviet discourses in the context of the conflict of identities. The paper raises some general problems regarding these discourses as well as the development of values within the antonymic memory frames in the context of its belonging to certain socio-cultural traditions, its compatibility with the dimensions of morality, the observance of Low, social responsibility, solidarity and openness too changes. Sintering the different approaches to the values, experience of formation and evolution social institutions, it also explores the role of Central European changes in the process of memory reconstruction in Ukraine. The paper considers cultural and law foundations of social reconstruction and problems related to historical foundation of different grope and communities. The article emphasizes that the lack of legal consciousness, disrespect for the law, the spread of rooted traditions of revolutionary purposefulness and the post soviet stile telephone justice are the serious obstacle for changes of post soviet frame and changes within European Union. In this context the aim of social groups is oriented to their historical memory transformation as well as the development of common European experience, symbolic and values heritage. At the same time the role of civil society as European foundation for historical changes is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I propose to visualize the representations and gender relations in the discourses of memory of the conflict in Colombia through textual productions made by the Historical Memory Center. If memory has the potential to account for past injustices in order to build a new and different future, it may also have great relevance in defining gender relations in the post-conflict society. If the voice of women is not heard and their disproportionate suffering is not shown, there is a risk for memory to victimize again and perpetuate structural exclusion. However, if discrimination is explained and women are dignified by emphasizing its key role in building peace, memory can contribute to produce more equitable and fair relations between the sexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory after violent conflict is a contentious issue. The way in which the past has been remembered has often been the impetus for renewed violence rather than healing and reconciliation. Exploring individual and collective memory in the Rwandan and South African contexts, this article argues that how we remember is more important than what we remember, if the process of remembering is to contribute positively to the post-conflict recovery process. This article considers some preliminary thoughts related to memory after violent conflict by comparing how South Africa and Rwanda have remembered their violent pasts. A significant difference between these two countries is that South Africa has allowed for contending narratives about the past to be in dialogue with one another, whereas Rwanda has chosen the route of preferring one narrative over others. Some possible implications of this will be explored in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of departure of this article is Ernest Renan's observation that the secret of nation-building is to get one's history wrong. We critically analyze -- in the broader and historical context of the encounters between Africans and Europeans -- the role of collective memory in its four functions of preservation, selection, elimination and invention. We focus on the first function to examine in depth how positive preservation of memory can become a form of nostalgia and how negative selection by memory can lead to elimination and amnesia. We argue that both nostalgia and amnesia can be forms of "getting one's history wrong" in order to get one's national identity right. We also attempt to show how historical invention can be consolidated into a false memory -- placing something in the past which was never there before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the assumption that the social management of historical time is a powerful tool in the political definition of reality, this paper analyzes how the history of the Romanian people has been periodized through the course of time. The central argument states that the partitioning system used to periodize the past harbors a hidden agenda, or a particular ideological "implicature", that can be brought to light by analyzing the temporal watersheds selected as defining moments in the history of that community. The paper analyzes the social logic of periodization operating within the Romania national history textbooks, revealing how socio-political conditions determine the temporal structuring of the past. Moreover, it shows how social change, and especially the change of the socio-political regime, leads to a revertebration of the past's symbolic backbone. Dramatic social and political change results in reconfiguring the formal structure of the collective consciousness concerning the past, within which specific events of Romanian history acquire their meaning. In conclusion, the study shows that, although resorting to a system of periodization is indeed a cognitive prerequisite for understanding the past, the reality of the past does not come with an already-there articular structure, so that "carving the (past's) reality at its joints", as Plato put it, is not a possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a conference on sociological aspects of memory, held in Augsburg, Germany, from March 22-23, 2012. Topics of discussion included the concepts of collective memory and organizational memory, the theories of memory of philosophers Hartmut Rosa and Walter Benjamin, and the social and psychological aspects of mourning.

The article discusses abebuu adekai, literally "receptacles of proverbs," coffins created by the Ga people of Ghana. The author begins by discussing the relationship between adeka and clothing, treating the coffin as an object of remembrance that is meant to be worn. In addition, the author explores the relationship between coffins and various aspects of social life, paying particular focus to the close link between adeka and property rights. Finally, the author discusses the coffin's empathetic effect as a living body in motion.

The article examines several books written by sociologist and philosopher Joseph Yvon Thériault in order to demonstrates how cultural sociology developed by Québécois sociologist, Fernand Dumont, influenced the concept of memory in Thériault's works. Some of the books mentioned include "La Vigile du Québec, octobre 1970: l'impasse," "Le lieu de l'homme: la culture comme distance et mémoire," and "L'Avenir de la mémoire." The author highlights the relationship between memory, modernity, and politics applicable to Québec and Acadia.

This article examines two seemingly opposed modes of place-making, urban sprawl and historic preservation, and their relationship to memory. The author contends that urban sprawl creates a landscape of either willful or accidental amnesia, where the powers of place are neutralized by ignoring them or removing them from history. Historic preservation, however, can have equally depoliticizing effects by conjuring up peculiar, selective, or even wholly imaginary pasts. Despite their apparent opposition, both practices often work against a meaningful understanding of the relationship between identity, memory, and place. Rather than accept the false choice between amnesia and nostalgia, the author advocates for an ethos of what Walter Benjamin calls “porosity” in creating, maintaining, and evaluating the vitality of our urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2006, the stated remit of the SPMA has been broadened to include the archaeology of the present day. This paper discusses what such an archaeology might look like and how the particular perspectives on the world derived from it can be incorporated into the way we see post-medieval archaeology, both theoretically and practically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between the transnational human rights movement and memory discourse. The author discusses sociological research drawing links between memory and law and justice and describes the necessity of historical contextualization of both human rights and memory. Specific topics include moral aspects of law and human rights, the relationship between human rights and Western democracy, cultural rights, and immigration politics in Western countries.

Copyright of Acta Sociologica (0186-6028) is the property of Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article has as its theme the place military settlements hold in the memory of the Russian people since the early 1800s and the reason that this memory is so strong. Among the reasons the author gives are that the settlements directly involved up to one percent of the population, were a model project of future military systems, and involved an enormous portion of the military budget in the 19th century. The article further discusses central themes of the memories: force and violence, as well as outbreaks of resistance to authority. The research for the article was based on recollections as seen through songs, proverbs and anecdotes, some of which are presented in the article.

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the last 30 years there has been a strengthening of a culture of memory that appears in multiple artistic, political and social manifestations. The emergence of scattered, fragmented, and conflicted private memories (which calls into question the foundations of national projects) is one of the symptoms of this transformation of societies in relation to the experience of temporality. In literary practice, this transformation has produced a type of literature that works with the past in order to recover specific memories. It is through this lens that I propose the analysis of "Las genealogías" by Margo Glantz and "Los rojos de ultramar" by Jordi Soler. [TRANSLATION]

The article discusses the concept of archives of memory in Latin America, with a focus on the methodology of the archives in their approach to history and memory. Topics discussed include the focus of these archives on the personal and individual level of memory and experience of events including torture and mutilation, the representation of atrocities, oppression, and violence, with reference to record of international organizations; and the concept of the uses and abuses of memory with reference to the representation of history.

This article focuses on the relationship between memory, female identity and the history of women: issues and areas of scholarship that have a comparatively recent history, but already present a rich spectrum of contrasting approaches and studies. In the case at hand, interpretations rooted in Foucault's genealogical approach are contrasted with more recent postcolonial studies, against the backdrop of the political history of European and American feminism, a position that can scarcely be reduced to the more familiar terms of the debate between philosophers and neuroscientists. The writing that springs from female memory is not the function of an alleged specificity of the female brain, but the product of the ability of a specific cultural subject to construct a genealogy from the point of view of its unprecedented reality: a seemingly minor "supplement," but one that has the power to subvert the main corpus of history and knowledge, as Virginia Woolf already showed in magisterial terms as early as 1929. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]