Collective Remembering Research Articles

Generative artificial intelligence and collective remembering. The technological mediation of mnemotechnic values

This paper shows that generative artificial intelligence is changing how the past is revealed to humans and how humans remember the past by reshaping the ethics of collective remembering and forgetting. Artificial intelligence is changing the nature of collective memory in a process that turns history from an object of media representation into an object of algorithmic performativity. By relying on the framework of postphenomenology, the analysis shows that artificial intelligence makes humans engage with notions of togetherness and boundlessness, gradually substituting issues of authenticity and accuracy as main referential frames in historical knowledge production. Consequentially, artificial intelligence mediates a dialogic version of historical awareness, which makes the past responsive to the distributed actions of human and non-human assemblages. In this process, generative artificial intelligence redefines what it means to be responsible and accountable in preserving, transmitting and promoting historical legacy by putting to work new mnemotechnic values.

You don’t understand me! But, I do! Awareness of cross-generational differences in collective remembering of national historic events

ABSTRACT Collective memories refer to a group’s shared representation of the past, which are slow to change over time. In this study, representative samples of American and German Younger Adults (YAs) and Older Adults (OAs) rated the emotional valence of 12 national historic events. Critically, both age groups were also asked to take on the perspective of the other: OAs imagined how YAs feel, whereas YAs imagined how OAs feel about the same events today. The results replicated previous findings that OAs and YAs hold differing opinions on numerous events. Both age groups successfully recognised these different collective perceptions between generations to some extent. Yet, OAs were more accurate in the perspective-taking task, with YAs consistently underestimating the intensity of OAs’ emotional valence. Self-reported perspective-taking strategies suggest that OAs relied more on stereotypes and considered education, while knowledge from specific people was universally used to rate the other age group’s perspective.

Things have changed but now they’ll stay the same: Generational differences and mental time travel for collective remembering of national historic events.

Things have changed but now they’ll stay the same: Generational differences and mental time travel for collective remembering of national historic events.

Building Counter-Colonial Commemorative Landscapes through Indigenous Collective Remembering in Wānanga

Statues and monuments are permanent forms of commemoration that interpret and reconstruct public memory in colonial settler societies. Representation through memorialisation is attributed to a genealogy of Western collective remembering that reflects the values, narratives, and experiences of the dominant settler population. Yet, collective remembering and memory can change. This article reports on Indigenous collective remembering practices that were observed in a local government intervention in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Boulcott Memorial Research Project sought iwi Māori (Indigenous Māori tribes) perspectives of the battle of Boulcott’s Farm to change a one-sided colonial memorial that was erected to honour British militia who died in the conflict. Iwi kaipūrākau (representatives) from Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Rangatahi, Ngāti Hāua, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira relayed their perspective of the battle through wānanga (a Māori oral tradition). In wānanga, kaipūrākau were perceived to remember relationally, outside colonial time, and through contemporary concerns and political interests, to advance tribal autonomy and self-determination. In this paper, I show how collective remembering in wānanga offers a counter-colonial ethic and intervention for building commemorative landscapes that can redirect public remembrance beyond the limitations of settler colonial memory and towards perspectives that are in tune with Indigenous peoples’ lived realities.

Constructing the tellability of intergenerational memory narratives in collective remembering in StoryCorps, a digital memory-sharing platform

In the present contribution, I explore how telling intergenerational memory episodes ensures the narrative tellability and memorability of autobiographical memories in StoryCorps, a digital memory-sharing platform and archive. I first pinpoint the structural and conceptual connections between narrative and autobiographical, intergenerational, and collective memory, highlighting the possible effects of digitalization and archiving on narrative structure. Then, I analyze four autobiographical stories with intergenerational family memories from the StoryCorps database to demonstrate how the storyteller constructs tellability and memorability by strategically centering the intergenerational memory episode. I conclude that sharing individual memories on digital storytelling platforms accomplishes complex identity work for two reasons. First, it facilitates the narrative transformation of these remembered events into digitally mediated collective memory. Second, storytelling becomes a source of agency and cultural responsibility. With its focused analysis of digitalized private memories, the article contributes to understanding how digital storytelling and memory-sharing mediate mnemonic practices by recording, storing, editing, and sharing autobiographical memory narratives for undetermined audiences in an indefinite time frame.

Old Skool Spinning and Syncing: Memory, Technologies, and Occupational Membership in a DJ Community

AbstractWe show how technology and its temporal instantiations act as material‐relational mnemonic devices that provide temporal anchors for collective remembering in occupations and form the basis of what we call an 'occupational mnemonic community'. This is important because how the past is remembered shapes politics, the definition of membership and boundaries within occupations. Empirically, we focus on the occupation of DJing, an occupation that has witnessed major technological transformation. Utilizing interviews, archival research, and auto‐ethnographic data, we show how DJs’ engagement with material mnemonic devices, here, DJing technology, aligns group members’ interpretations of the past, and forms the basis of an ‘occupational mnemonic community’. In our analysis, we uncover that imagined perceptions regarding how existing group members assess the material choices of newcomers, as well as, the performative behaviours exhibiting these choices, play pivotal roles in sustaining mnemonic communities. We conclude with a discussion on occupational mnemonic processes and their effect on establishing boundaries within occupations. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the sociomaterial aspects of collective memory and its significance in understanding the politics of memory in work communities and organizations.

Schematic narrative templates in national remembering

James V. Wertsch coined the concept of schematic narrative template in his Voices of Collective Remembering, which has become a classic work in memory studies. The central argument of this article is that the analytical power of the concept of schematic narrative template can be increased, and its methodological implications clarified, by making a distinction between plot structures, narrative schemata, and the practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption. The article demonstrates that these entities and their associated mechanisms and processes are different in kind and should therefore be studied by using different types of methods. Furthermore, the article elaborates on the cognitive aspects of Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template by distinguishing between the pattern completion and pattern matching functions of narrative schemata as well as between the cognitive processes of assimilation and accommodation of narrative schemata.

Collective Remembering and the Making of Political Culture

Collective Remembering and the Making of Political Culture

Remembering through #LetUsTalk: an affective archive narrating Iranian women´s everyday trauma and resistance habits

ABSTRACT This article explores the intersection of hashtag activism, remembering practices, and the diaspora by focusing on the #LetUsTalk hashtag. Employing feminist memory studies, it examines the evocation of objects, occasions, and experiences associated with the hashtag, particularly focusing on diasporic Iranian women´s memories of compulsory hijab and how these memories are embodied and remembered. This article argues that #LetUsTalk is a form of hashtag memory activism enabling diasporic Iranian women to shape an archive of affect. Within this archive, a diverse range of affective responses, bodily reactions, and resistance habits emerge as participants recall forgotten, mundane, and unwanted memories. Through conducting memory work, it sheds light on the capacity of hashtag memory activism to create a space for collective remembrance. In this type of collective remembering, non-participants add their voices to hashtag contributors to unveil hidden struggles of everyday life in connection with mundane memory objects, leading to the generation of new political and transformative actions even if they perform in a minor key.

Crisis and Memory - Trauma, Testimony and Collective Remembering in Partition Narrative

Crisis and Memory - Trauma, Testimony and Collective Remembering in Partition Narrative

Mnemonic Communities of Displaced Indigenous People: Northeast Indian Narratives of Cultural Memory

The displaced indigenous people in Northeast India belong to multiple ethnic groups scattered across the region. Most communities have a shared traumatic experience as the base of their collective remembering. Even though their relocation trauma resonates with others among the displaced, it does not surpass their strong ethnic predilection. Social processes of remembering to establish the community by drawing and redrawing the boundaries of different periods or eras in its historical trajectory. Cultural memory plays a significant role in revisiting and reforming the historical trajectory, especially in a space where cultural artefacts possess strong roots. Contemporary literature from the Northeast traces the trajectory of its history with the help of the available knowledge system and the lived-through experiences of ordinary Indigenous people. The study focuses on Easterine Kire’s A Respectable Woman (2019) and Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill (2014) as narratives of cultural memory in reconstructing the mnemonic communities of the indigenous population in Northeast India, helping them in the process of identification by confronting the hegemonic conflicting memories.

“The Pride Revolution”

Israel has recently undertaken a branding strategy that has created a problematic image of the country as an LGBTQ haven in a supposedly sexually retrograde Middle East. Interestingly, while there is a large body of critical scholarship investigating the workings of Israeli homonationalism outwards, as a form of soft diplomacy, wooing international constituencies, the question of how homonationalism is discursively produced and circulated inwards for Israeli audiences has remained relatively unexplored. In order to gain a glimpse of homonationalism within Israel, we analyze the documentary hamahapexa hagea (“which was broadcast in Hebrew by the Israeli public broadcasting corporation on May 2020. With the help of the notions of collective remembering, scale and affect, we demonstrate how the remembering of the Israeli LGBTQ movement and its affective loading, pride, is characterized by specific spatio-temporal discursive moves that position Israel as an exceptional context. On a national scale, Middle-Easternness is highlighted as a key feature of Israel’s exceptional character, enabling Israel to “come out” as simultaneously pro-gay and Mizrahi (lit. “Oriental”). On a global scale, the more traditional and Middle Eastern traits of Israel are downplayed, with a view to portraying Israel as a positive exception of LGBTQ progress compared to the West. Interestingly, the military is made to play a key role in the construction of Israeli exceptionalism with regard to LGBTQ rights, and grief and trauma for fallen soldiers is presented as the emotional litmus test for acceptance of non-normative sexualities in Israel.

Memory in energy transitions: individual agency through historical narratives in the energy transition to gas and electricity in the Dutch household

Authors adopting socio-technical frameworks to study energy transitions argue that individual behavioural change and the uptake of social and technological innovations on higher-level scales are both imperative for sustainability transitions to come about. However, the way individuals are embedded in the larger system has remained largely unclear. To better understand individual embedment in energy transitions, this paper enriches sustainability transition research with the insights of memory studies. During energy transitions, social actors that enact these transitions change their identity. A core premise of memory studies is that individual and collective remembering cannot do without each other in the constitution of identity. To illustrate the role of memory in energy transitions, this paper conducts a historical case study of the role of housewives in the energy transition to gas and electricity in the Dutch household. By adopting a narrative approach, the historical narratives across the Monthly Magazine of the Dutch Association for Housewives (NVvH), published between 1913 and 1942, are explored. The results show how the master narrative prescribed the guiding principles of the historical narratives that emerged in the energy discourse. However, as part of the flexible nature of memory, a varied ‘menu of stories’ came forward that enabled individuals to identify with different historical narratives, incorporating differing energy sources and drawing on the transformative nature of memory by imagining different energy futures. It is concluded that individual agency in energy transitions moves beyond choices of use and consumption. It rests in the individuals’ ability to identify with a historical narrative that adheres to the way the individual makes sense of the world.

Settler memory and Indigenous counter-memories: narrative struggles over the history of colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT As with other settler colonies, Aotearoa New Zealand has seen a long-running conflict between a Euro-centric ‘master narrative’ of the historical past and Indigenous counter-narratives. Previous research on these narrative struggles adopts the ‘top-down’ perspective on collective remembering, focusing primarily on how memory entrepreneurs deploy cultural texts and practices to construct particular representations of history. To broaden the methodological scope, the analysis developed in this paper follows the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which makes it possible to map the distribution of collective memories across individuals and investigate their attitudinal effects. By means of a rigorous survey study (N = 1,066), the paper reveals three key findings about collective remembering in Aotearoa New Zealand. First, individuals in the ‘critical years’ of adolescence are more open to weaving Indigenous Māori perspectives into their understandings of history than older generations. Second, when compared to the monocultural master narrative, historical reconstructions that reflect Māori experiences promote a more inclusive understanding of national identity and generate public support for redressing historical injustices against Māori. Third, the empirical analysis finds no evidence for claims made by conservative political actors that creating space for the articulation of Māori histories perpetuates social division and weakens popular identification with the nation.

Funerally Yours: A Collective Re-Membering of Taking It to the Grave

Funerally Yours: A Collective Re-Membering of <i>Taking It to the Grave</i>

“Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” The Wizarding World of Harry Potter as a constructed site of (artificial) collective memory, identity, and resistance

ABSTRACT This essay positions the “magic” of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida as residing at the distinctive confluence of multimodal rhetorics, memory, and fandom identity, with ramifications reaching into current socio-political realities of resistance, democracy, and communication. The Wizarding World, as a site central to the Harry Potter fandom’s collective memory and identity, reifies the values of inclusivity, equality, anti-violence, and anti-authoritarianism present throughout the fictional narrative. Despite author J.K. Rowling’s ongoing trafficking in hate speech, these resistance-based values continue to fuel the fandom’s identity, activism, and worldview. To more effectively articulate this nexus of fiction, identity, memory, and materiality, and to better account for the collective remembering of a group whose identity is bound by and to the imaginary events and characters of a fiction, this essay offers the concept of “artificial” collective memory as a useful scholarly heuristic.

Discourses of collective remembering: contestation, politics, affect

ABSTRACT This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three consequential dimensions of remembrance, which the articles in the issue examine in different ways: that collective remembering is an interpersonal, political and affective practice. This introduction discusses these three dimensions to collective remembering in greater detail, before outlining the remaining contents of the Special Issue.

From disenchantment to glory: Fluctuations in the memory of World War II in Japanese Cinema (1980–2020)

In recent decades, the field of memory studies has shown increasing interest in the reconstruction of the past through the lens of cinema. The ongoing “war for memory” or “history problem,” as it is otherwise known, in East Asia vis-à-vis the memory of World War II provides plentiful opportunities for exploration of the role films play in shaping collective remembering. This study was designed to answer the question of how World War II has been remembered in Japanese cinema by detecting patterns and fluctuations of memory in a sample of 59 movies released between 1980 and 2020. The results suggest that World War II has most frequently been depicted as a natural disaster (beginning in 1942) that evolved into a conflict between Japan and the United States alone—other Asian countries having been cast as mere spectators. Finally, after a heroic fight to the death in which only the Japanese suffered, the disaster ended in 1945 as mysteriously as it began.

Coloniality and the Mbuya Nehanda Statue: A Decolonial Analysis of Twitter Users’ Comments

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates debates that took place after the erection of the statue of Mbuya Nehanda, a Zimbabwean liberation war heroine. The paper employs thematic analysis and [Thompson, J. B. 1990. Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press] ideological schema to explore the underlying discourses and ideological assumptions evoked by the tweets that circulated on the Mbuya Nehanda Twitter hashtag (#MbuyaNehanda). Considering Twitter as an agonistic space of contestation and resistance, the paper examines the political and cultural significance of the Mbuya Nehanda statue at this moment in Zimbabwe’s history, bringing into focus the contestations over history, culture, and memory in the postcolonial nation. Findings reveal that the state’s politicisation of the memory of Mbuya Nehanda foils its attempt to create a collective remembering of her due to the fragmentations that exist in the postcolonial nation. This paper goes beyond critiquing the manifest discourses and tensions between the citizens and the state to consider the possibilities offered by the Mbuya Nehanda statue as a harbinger of new knowledges, not only relating to the continuities and discontinuities of colonial history and the present but to African spirituality as well. Using decolonial perspectives informed by epistemologies of the South, the article argues for epistemic pluriversality that recognises diverse forms of knowledge and diverse ways of being.

:Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989–2019

:<i>Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989–2019</i>