Family Memory Research Articles

History and family memory: the ‘Burning of Cork’ 11 and 12 December 1920

ABSTRACT As in community settings, intangible narrative evidence may exist within a family’s living memory, awaiting a trigger to inspire investigation. During the 2016 SFLS annual conference in Dublin, marking the 1916 Easter Rising, such a catalyst appeared to the author. A replica newspaper, recounting the ‘Burning of Cork’ revived his interest in a story told to him by his father. On the night of 11 December 1920, horrendous destruction and violence occurred in Cork city, Ireland. In retaliation for attacks against Crown Forces by Irish Volunteers, supporting Irish Independence, the Government sent in an irregular military force commonly known as the ‘Black and Tans’. This paper explores the conflict as experienced and remembered by the author’s family in both oral and written testimonies. Comparison with newspaper reports and other sources attempts to unravel the various threads in a complex story.

Historical Memory as an Integrative Resource of All-Russian Civic Identity of Students

Introduction. During the search for the foundations of the national consolidation of Russian society, the problem of collective historical memory is being actualized – ideas about the common past that have developed in the mass consciousness of Russians. Among the mechanisms of their construction are various types of commemorative practices and memory locations that support the feelings of citizenship and patriotism. The processes of solidarization with the all-Russian civic community in the youth environment are of the greatest research interest. The aim of the article is to describe the role of collective historical memory in the process of formation of all-Russian civic identity, identifying the factors influencing its configuration and the predictors of its actualization. Materials and Methods. As the empirical basis of the study, the data of an interregional sociological survey of 1–2 year students of the largest universities of the three subjects of the Volga Federal District of the Russian Federation (n = 1247, October 2020) are used. Results. The representation of the all-Russian identity among students is 62 %. The main role in its formation belongs to the emotional imagery of the represented historical knowledge, which determines the importance of such sources of information as family memories, fiction, and television. Discussion and Conclusion. The conclusions obtained as a result of the study, actualize the search for new forms of work on citizenship education of modern youth within the institutions of education, on the one hand, and solving the problems of mythologizing images of the past in the media environment – on the other hand.

Passive Framework of Sparse Region Duplication Detection from Digital Images

Currently, digital images are widely communicated by media using social media applications. The general public captures the digital images for preserving the family and personal memories and to share with their friends and family. Digital images have been used extensively in forensic science to present the digital images as proof in the court and law enforcement agencies, which present a loophole for the culprits to forge the digital image and change the proofs and evidence. Copy-move forgery (CMF) is among the most widely employed image manipulation methods. In this method, the area of the image is duplicated to some other part to modify its content by applying different postprocessing operations on images like blurring, color reduction, and scaling which is a challenging research problem in copy-move forgery detection (CMFD). In this paper, an efficient and effective CMFD method is presented to identify the single and multiple altered areas in an image in the presence of postprocessing operations. The proposed CMFD method divides the image into circular blocks. It computes a rotation-invariant feature vector from each circular block of the image by applying local intensity order pattern (LIOP) features. The computed feature vectors are then compared using Euclidean distance to locate the suspected image’s forged areas. The experimental results of the proposed CMFD method are reported on three standard datasets of the CMF, namely, CoMoFoD, KLTCI, and MICC-F220. The experimental analysis of the proposed CMFD method on these datasets indicates that it produces robust performance (detection accuracies of 97.29% on the CoMoFoD dataset, 98.53% on the KLTCI dataset, and 97.57% on the MICC-F220 dataset) as compared with state-of-the-art CMFD methods in terms of the standard performance evaluation parameters of the CMF.

Measuring positive memories of home and family during childhood: The development and initial validation of the 'Memories of Home and Family Scale'.

There is a burgeoning evidence base highlighting the positive influence of benevolent childhood experiences (BCEs), even in the context of adversity. However, few measures are available to assess BCEs. The current study sought to develop and validate a measure which assesses positive recollections of experiences and emotions at home and with family during childhood called the ‘Memories of Home and Family Scale’(MHFS). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was employed to test the latent structure of the preliminary MHFS item scores in a sample of university students from the United Kingdom (N = 624). Following selection of the best-fitting model and final items for inclusion in the scale, total and subscale scores were correlated with a range of mental health outcomes. CFA results indicated that the latent structure of the MHFS items was best represented by a correlated six-factor first-order model. The final MHFS demonstrated high levels of internal reliability and convergent validity.

Zhiznennyj put' svyashchennosluzhitelya v Sovetskoj Rossii (k 120-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya mitropolita Kishinevskogo i Moldavskogo Nektariya)

The period of existence of the Soviet State became a time of severe trials for the Russian Orthodox Church and its clergy. This article is devoted to the activity of author’s great-uncle Metropolitan Nektary of Chisinau and Moldavia. In the country of the Soviets, he went a thorny path from a simple monk to a bishop. Father Nektary was always faithful to Orthodoxy in the bossom of the patriarchal church. During his ministry, the knew the sorrows and joys that many other members of the clergy experienced in the Soviet era. The article is written on the basis of the documents from the personal archive of the Metriopolitan and family memories of him.

The Memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 in the regional Internet space: the experience of discourse analysis

This article is devoted to the discourse analysis of the comments of regional news sites and public publications about the commemorations of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Based on the application of the methodology of Siegfried Yeager's critical discourse analysis, the peculiarities of the perception of official memorials dedicated to the memory of the Great Patriotic War in the Internet space of the Tula and Tomsk regions were analyzed. The sources for the analysis were comments from users of social networks, Internet blogs and news sites of the two regions in the period 2015-2021, dedicated to Victory Day (May 9), the Immortal Regiment campaign, topical regional commemorations of the Great Patriotic War, as well as mentions of individual pages of family memory and events of war heroes. Despite the fact that sociological surveys of recent years show the preservation of the memory of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 as the most important historical event and ideological reference point in the mass historical consciousness, the study of the perception of war memorials on the Internet shows a further increase in the devaluation of historical meanings of the Russian memorial culture and the departure to particular versions of historical memory (family, local social group). The tendency of fragmentation and transformation of perception of the past in the regional Internet space was revealed. The analysis of a sample set of comments indicates the persistence of the trend of sacralization of war heroes, veterans and family memory of them in the mass consciousness, as well as attempts to contrast family commemorations of Victory Day and official events and actions of the authorities. In both areas, the fact of using the discussion of the May 9 commemorations and the "Immortal Regiment" campaign as a symbolic framework for criticizing the domestic and foreign policies of the current government was recorded. At the same time, most of the critical comments are situational in nature and are related to topical regional socio-economic problems.

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

“You’re Always in Transit, but the House Stays”: Remitting, Restoring and Remaking Home in a Migrant Family House in Cuenca, Ecuador

ABSTRACT Unravelling the emotional and relational bases of migrant transnational housing is an emerging challenge for research on home, family and migration. Based on a house biography in Cuenca, Ecuador, this paper reconstructs how a transnational family strived to preserve their past house by renovating it as a bed-and-breakfast. Building on narrative and ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how far a house with a commercial purpose and no permanent dwellers reproduces a sense of “home”, and to the benefit of whom. We thereby connect this house biography to four societal questions: the retention of family memories, the interdependence between distant kin, the temporalities of housing and the commodification of the domestic. This fourfold analysis has fundamental implications for the meaning of home for migrants and for its interplay with housing, fixity and continuity, with an ultimate focus on what the house does, rather than on what it is.

FAMILY ARCHIVES AS A STORAGE OF MEMORY ABOUT FAMILY HISTORY (A CASE STUDY OF FINNISH AND KARELIAN FAMILIES OF THE MURMANSK REGION)

The article is devoted to the issue of preservation and translation of family memory in the materialized form of a home archive. Interest in family archives is due to the fact that the collection of documents and photographs by each individual family contributes to the preservation of memory, turning it into history. The article discusses which documents have helped to recreate the history of each family, how this story interacts with macrohistory, which documents are most valuable and why. Thus, knowledge about the history of one’s family (microhistory) is closely intertwined with macrohistory. In addition, thanks to family archives, the formation of ethnic identity and local self-awareness of the individual takes place. The article analyzes the composition and functions of archives. Family archives include various biographical documents, ego-documents that make it possible to clarify the details of the biographical trajectories and circumstances of family life, photographs that not only reproduce the appearance of the characters in family history, but also reflect the traditions, the environment of the past. The composition of the documents indicates which facts and circumstances of family history are significant for descendants. Official documents stored in family archives can perform various functions, for example, serve as a source for the reconstruction of the family tree and confirm ethnic origin. The importance of family archives lies not only in helping to recreate the history of an individual, family, but also as a valuable historical source.

Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and the “familia-graphic” gaze

ABSTRACT In Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje plays the “family history detective” as he searches for his ancestry in Sri Lanka. This article explores the workings of family memory and the diasporic imagination as it emerges from both the colonial archive and the oral histories of his relatives in Sri Lanka and elsewhere. It argues that the text’s “familia-graphic” gaze reveals how “evidence” of inherited material culture, while touchable and concrete, remains ambiguous and interpretive. Through close analysis of both the text and images within the book, the article shows that a “familia-graphic” gaze is directed at Sri Lanka, its colonial history, and Ondaatje’s ancestors. This archaeological approach to family history differentiates between the role of the map and photograph in prompting familia-graphic memory as it seeks to piece together the traces of family, memory, and place held within the maps and photographs scattered throughout Running in the Family.

Polish Refugee Children in India: Personal Memory, Grassroots Activism, and Transnational Commemorative Diplomacy

This article explores the memory of nearly one thousand Polish child refugees who found safe haven in India during the Second World War. It discusses how from the 1970s onward, the former refugees attempted to sustain the memory of their exilic homeland, often with support from other memory actors in both Poland and India. Analyzing both personal testimonies and grassroots memory activism, this article investigates the intertwining of individual memory with wider memorial trends, such as vernacular, national, and transnational memory. By discussing the ways in which personal and familial memory of wartime childhood serve as a springboard for other commemorative initiatives, this article also examines how children and young people feature in public memory, both as memory actors and objects of commemoration. In doing so, not only do I ask broader questions about remembering children that are relevant to this special issue, but also provide a window into the vicissitudes of Polish politics of memory from the late 1940s to the present.

High Noon Reclamation, and: Untitled 2 Ate Untitled 1

High Noon Reclamation, and: Untitled 2 Ate Untitled 1 Tania Chen (bio) High Noon Reclamation Your loneliness is a long-term project. You sit with it, stones in your mouth; edge to edge, front to back, the light on the wall creeps. You replace the stones with musical notes and your family memory resides in a distant country (—the memory waking old aches that belong to your great-grandfather and the war wounds he brought with him across the sea). Your great-grandmother kept washing old clothes until they were all brightly bleached (—you don't remember her face, just her hands: calloused and worked to the bone). Your grandparents, your parents, they were just tests, a way of setting the ground (—but you, you are different. Meant to be so much better, meant to fit in under the bright noon sun). There is no place to hide the inadequacy of your being, too much and too little by any rule you're measured with. Your parents have given too much to fit in (—they hope, as their parents did before, that you are shaped correctly enough to make this). Your mouth knows how to pronounce all the words your grandmother stumbled on. The words your great-grandmother never bothered to learn (—in return you've given up the voice of your ancestors — the language feels awkward in you). [End Page 65] UNTITLED 2 ATE UNTITLED 1 My insides are glossy ceramic smooth and deep red, an eternal Chinese New Year that holds my memories trapped in that single moment. The ribs are paper-mâché, a cave-in at the slightest pressure; the heart a chrysanthemum nestled at the left-center; liver, stomach, and kidneys the shape of oval jade, protruding slightly when I inhale. The New Horizon spacecraft measures the blackness of space, subtracts known sources of light. In the same way, I slip a hand down my throat to measure the darkness inside. I dreamt of constellations swimming within, was told there are no horizons in space: only the inky black, billions of stars already dead thousands of light-years away. [End Page 66] Tania Chen Tania Chen is a Chinese-Mexican queer writer. Their work has been published in Unfettered Hexes by Neon Hemlock, they are a first reader for Strange Horizons and Nightmare Magazine and a graduate of the Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop of January/Feb 2021. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Queen Victoria and the Photographic Expression of Widowhood

After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria began an extended period of mourning that remains indelibly linked to perceptions of her identity and visual representation. This article firstly addresses the place of photography in the construction of family memory and examines how Victoria used photography to articulate her private grief and to remember Albert in the context of both her immediate and extended family. Secondly, I seek to establish the ways in which this private image is made public and is circulated by Victoria to generate popular empathy and support for political ends. Lastly, I touch on the global reach of this, and question how mourning and widowhood are implicated in international royal networks and imperial power. Thus, the article reveals the photograph of the mourning widow as more than just an illustration of Victoria and her grief; rather, it shows how the medium shapes that grief and makes it useful for monarchy and empire.

The Wound of Time

The Wound of Time

Review Essay: “It all begins with women”: Women's Resilience in Fascist Italy and War

Review Essay: “It all begins with women”: Women's Resilience in Fascist Italy and War

Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

Excavating Memory: Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin

Challenges in Family Sports Tourism Development at Pulau Langkawi: Perceptions of Sports Tourists

Today, families are considered the main contributors to the growing market of tourism business. This trend is motivated by the growing awareness on retaining family ties and generating memories of family memories. Making decision for family sports tourism is a challenging task, especially when it involves inter-generational tourism. Although family tourism is growing globally, details of challenges that constrain family tourists varies across the globe and surprisingly no study has so far addressed the issue thoroughly especially in Malaysia. This paper relates the challenges experienced by families of different income levels in family sports tourism at Pulau Langkawi. The objectives were answered based on a survey conducted among 243 family sports tourists at Pulau Langkawi and data collected using questionnaire was statistically tested using MANOVA. Regardless of family income level, quantitative findings identified the influential challenges in significant order as structural constraints, interpersonal constraints, and intrapersonal constraints, with participation fee as the main constraint factor. Family sports tourists of different income group were not significantly constrained by any specific barrier. There is a potential of gaining more knowledge on the barriers experienced in family sports tourism by focusing on other demographic variables. This paper generates a better thought on the challenges experienced in family sports tourism and the prospect in the upcoming sports tourism business.

‘We thought she was a witch’: Gender, class and whiteness in the familial ‘memory archive’

‘We thought she was a witch’ uses my own ‘memory archive’ to give texture to the complex inheritance of gender, class and race that characterises the present. Drawing on interviews, archival data and fictionalisation, the article explores the role of gendered labour in securing dominant understandings of class progress. Starting from stories, my mother and I weave together of the history of 64 Chepstow Road, Newport (where her maternal family lived), I highlight the cost of historiography that does not pay attention to what is written out of family memory. The article draws on existing feminist memory work to flesh out an intersectional approach to the ‘memory archive’ we inherit and introduces the importance of an imaginative approach to the past.

The Asian Americans’ Identity Crisis as Reflected in Day Standing on Its Head

Philip Kan Gotanda's heritage is professionally woven into nearly all of his work. The combination of family memories and theatrical inventions makes him the faithful chronicler of the Asian American experience. The past visibly invades the present in most of his works and characters, while he interweaves a distinctly theatrical magic charm around them, producing a crystal clear picture of Asian American life. His plays feature arguments between men and women with differing visions of how Asian Americans should fight to be a part of America. One can say that it would be more challenging to assign Day Standing on Its Head as a merely Asian American play because Gotanda exposes socio-cultural issues that can fit all the mainstream audience. Although the characters in this play confront problems rooted in the particularities of Japanese American history and culture, their conflicts reveal psychological and emotional realities that resonate beyond the Japanese American community. Along with all of Gotanda's works, he never sacrifices his ethnic authenticity to gain the acceptance and visibility of the mainstream audience. On the other hand, he claims the right to present the "real" face of the Asian American problems, issues, and conflicts, just to record their real life without any decoration. Gotanda argues that his style in discussing these issues can help in strengthening relations with the mainstream.

Remembering the War: An Autoethnography of Survival

This is an autoethnography of World War II (WW2) survival and trauma based on a recovered family archive and a reflexive engagement with my own childhood memories. Driven by subjective imperatives to bear witness to forgotten war experiences, and to explore family mental health problems, I delve into not just personal memories but forgotten voices found in the archive whose stories have never been told thus offering a perspective of multiple subjects. My grandmother’s witness testimony of concentration camp survival recorded in 1946 compels me to research and reflect on life in the state of exception and the long-term and intergenerational impact on survivors. This autoethnographic work helps me examine the character of survival of war trauma as a form of exclusion from community and often an incomplete return from bare life to polis. Through engaging with the archive, I find some partial answers to questions about my family members, and reconstruct my family memory narrative.