Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (original) (raw)
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Making visible: Memory Wound and the site of memory in the 21st century (Introduction and full text)
This dissertation utilises existing literature on memory discourse to discuss the role and history of memory sites in the 21st century. Using the case study of the as of yet unrealised memorial site Memory Wound by artist Jonas Dahlberg, the first part will aim to prove and provide context for understanding the function and aesthetic of memory sites from the mid-20th century up to the 2010s. The second will introduce the debates surrounding Memory Wound, and assess its position in and implications for the established sociocultural function of memory sites. Rather than a quantitative survey of memory sites or an inquiry into the role of mourning on a global scale, this dissertation is the result of qualitative research with the aim of accomplishing an in-depth understanding of contemporary memory sites as a social and cultural phenomena within Western Europe and North America. It is important to note that all other case studies and literature used to support the contextualisation of Memory Wound all fit within this literary, geographical, social, and cultural territory. I have utilised existing literature, from seminal texts outlining memory discourse in the 1990s when the phenomena emerged in critical theory, to critical texts from the last decade. I have also gained access to publically available reports, government strategy documents, and articles which have been produced in Norway between 2011 and 2016, outlining the process of memorialisation which ensued after the 22 July attacks. By juxtaposing literature, both propositional and critical, on memory discourse, with reports and academic inquiries into the psychosocial effects of modern memory sites, I have used Memory Wound and its historical backdrop to reflect a contemporary moment in the evolution of memory sites. At a time where developments in technology and cultural representations are continuing and accelerating the cultural shift away from singular narratives and site-specific experiences, the nature of memory sites continues to evolve, and be challenged by the historical and technological effects on our relationship to history, time, and memory, challenging the social and political intentions and effects of memory sites in the 21st century.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014
This chapter considers the definitional and disciplinary politics surrounding the study of memory, exploring the various sites of memory study that have emerged within the field of communication. Specifically, this chapter reviews sites of memory and commemoration, ranging from places such as museums, monuments, and memorials, to textual forms, including journalism and consumer culture. Within each context, this chapter examines the ways in which these sites have interpreted and reinterpreted traumatic pasts bearing great consequence for national identity. It concludes with a discussion of the challenges set forth by new media for scholars engaging in studies of the politics of memory and identifies areas worthy of future research.
Crossroads of Memory: Contexts, Agents, and Processes in a Global Age
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2012
“Crossroads of Memory” gathers eight essays that revisit and critique some key assumptions about transnational memory, such as the dominant view that it weakens nationalist memory and ideology and that it is a force of progress. Instead of pitting the national against the transnational camp, this issue invites readers to consider the crossroads of memory and examine the encounter between different kinds of memory: hegemonic and minoritized, authentic and performed, and private and public. Analyzing the crossroads means recovering specific contexts, agents, and processes of memory making too often obscured in the recent theorization of transnational memory.
This dissertation utilises existing literature on memory discourse to discuss the role and history of memory sites in the 21st century. Using the case study of the as of yet unrealised memorial site Memory Wound by artist Jonas Dahlberg, the first part will aim to prove and provide context for understanding the function and aesthetic of memory sites from the mid-20th century up to the 2010s. The second will introduce the debates surrounding Memory Wound, and assess its position in and implications for the established sociocultural function of memory sites. Rather than a quantitative survey of memory sites or an inquiry into the role of mourning on a global scale, this dissertation is the result of qualitative research with the aim of accomplishing an in-depth understanding of contemporary memory sites as a social and cultural phenomena within Western Europe and North America. It is important to note that all other case studies and literature used to support the contextualisation of Memory Wound all fit within this literary, geographical, social, and cultural territory. I have utilised existing literature, from seminal texts outlining memory discourse in the 1990s when the phenomena emerged in critical theory, to critical texts from the last decade. I have also gained access to publically available reports, government strategy documents, and articles which have been produced in Norway between 2011 and 2016, outlining the process of memorialisation which ensued after the 22 July attacks. By juxtaposing literature, both propositional and critical, on memory discourse, with reports and academic inquiries into the psychosocial effects of modern memory sites, I have used Memory Wound and its historical backdrop to reflect a contemporary moment in the evolution of memory sites. At a time where developments in technology and cultural representations are continuing and accelerating the cultural shift away from singular narratives and site-specific experiences, the nature of memory sites continues to evolve, and be challenged by the historical and technological effects on our relationship to history, time, and memory, challenging the social and political intentions and effects of memory sites in the 21st century.
Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social (2017). (Preview: Contents and Introduction)
Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social Edited by Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo and Eivind Røssaak. Amsterdam University Press, 2016, 332 pages, 39 b/w illustrations. ISBN:9789462982147 How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions, phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very much up in the air. The essays in this collection discuss the new technologies of memory from a variety of perspectives that explicitly investigate their impact on the very concept of the social. Contributors: David Berry, Ina Blom, Wolfgang Ernst, Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Liv Hausken, Yuk Hui, Trond Lundemo, Adrian Mackenzie, Sónia Matos, Richard Mills, Jussi Parikka, Eivind Røssaak, Stuart Sharples, Tiziana Terranova, Pasi Väliaho. Full book available for download in Open Access: http://oapen.org/search?identifier=619950;keyword=memory%20in%20motion
Memory and History in the age of digital media
In today's media-saturated culture, networked systems of information and communication remediate the practices and the perceptions relevant to Memory and History. By highlighting a number of cultural shifts in how information, memory and history are produced today, this paper aims to offer a perspective on how our society is "remembering" via the new digital media that increasingly mediate our contemporary reality.
The Ethics of Forgetting and Remembering in the Digital World through the Eye of the Media
The Ethics of Memory in a Digital Age
The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from 'what we know' to 'how we remember it'; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is 'memory' under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdiscipli-nary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination?
Global Memory in the Digital World: Is Another History Possible
Kültür ve İletişim, 2017
Digital media that lead to a transformation of the experience of time and space also evokes new questions for the field of memory. The sustainability of social memory once guaranteed in traditional societies through the bonds and relations that held groups together. Today, in a computerized society, the patterns of common belonging have changed. Beyond categories of the traditional, cultural, and national, new sets of bonds are bringing people together, such as people becoming "relatives in sufferings." This study argues that digital media have created spaces for unique and quite different collectivities through the opportunities they afford for bringing people together around the world. Moreover, such media have become a space for global memory and even new identity projects. The argument also problematizes the issue of whether digital data has the potential to oppose the official histories aimed at the legitimation of official ideologies with a counterhistory through the digital platforms of Bak.
THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY Preface and Introduction
The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right, 2021
THE GUARDIANS OF MEMORY AND THE RETURN OF THE XENOPHOBIC RIGHT Translated by Alastair McEwen Copyright © Bompiani, 2019 USA Edition copyright © 2020 CPL EDITIONS All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-941046-32-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface For a Memory Culture Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. By Michael Rothberg. 9 Introduction What Went Wrong? 19 By Valentina Pisanty Chapter I, The Duty of Memory. 31 Chapter II, The Discourse of History 75 Chapter III, Collective Memories 109 Chapter IV, New Cinema of the Shoah 153 Chapter V, The Spectacle of Evil 201 Chapter VI, Denial and Punishment 229 Appendix 263 End notes 285 Bibliography 307 Filmography 329 Index 335
The Digital Turn in Memory Studies
Mandolessi, Silvana. “The Digital Turn in Memory Studies”. Special Issue: Taking Stock of Memory Studies. Memory Studies 16.6: 1513-1528., 2023
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 inceptioncollective 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 nonhuman 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.