Abstract
Abstract∞ This article provides new insight into how the ‘found grandchildren’ of postconflict Argentina are reconstructing their sense of self and identity after having been identified as children of disappeared political activists in the aftermath of the last military regime (1976–1983). We offer tools for understanding how they respond to the context-specific transitional justice measures of identification and restitution, and how this plays out on social media. This online world expands the possibilities to both share and comment on personal and public information. The narrative analysis discusses how our informants influence the Argentine transitional justice process by using social media as a stage for the performance of their life stories. However, their digital presentation of self is constrained to a certain extent by potential social reactions.
Highlights
Each year on her biological mother’s birthday, Belinda Rocıo[1] publishes a picture of her on Facebook
We offer tools for understanding how they respond to the contextspecific transitional justice measures of identification and restitution, and how this plays out on social media
We explore how specific users of social media – the identified children of Argentina’s disappeared political activists – present their version of social reality by using these technological infrastructures in their everyday lives, as well as how their use of social media can shed light upon the various ways in which they reconstruct their sense of self and identity
Summary
Each year on her biological mother’s birthday, Belinda Rocıo[1] publishes a picture of her on Facebook. The birthday cards Belinda Rocıo posts on her timeline allow her to keep her mother’s memory alive, to bring the past into the present and to incorporate her mother’s story into her own Is this an expression of how she reconstructs her biological parents’ memory and Argentina’s memory of the human rights violations committed by the country’s last military regime, but it helps her to understand where she comes from and who she is. Our empirical material shows that the legal structures of the transitional justice process have conditioned the niet@s’ development of self and identity, and, to a certain extent, deprived some of them of the ability to exert agency in their own lives This forms part of the social reality they live in, and influences how they present themselves physically in the Argentine society, and the ways in which they create self-presentations and profile pages on social network sites. Com/statistics/282333/number-of-facebook-users-in-argentina/; Instituto Nacional de Estadıstica y Concensos Republica Argentina, ‘Base de datos REDATAM del Censo 2010,’ https://www.indec. gob.ar/nivel2_default.asp?seccion=P&id_tema=2 (both accessed 5 March 2019). Tufekci, supra n 8 at 31. Ibid., 20
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