Preservation Of Collective Memory Research Articles

The Role of the Albanian Media as Mediator and Creator of Collective Memory

Media plays a crucial role in the development and preservation of collective memory. Each social group constructs a memory package from its past, emphasizing its uniqueness and passing it on to future generations. As a creator of social constructs, the media has a primary role in shaping and building collective memory. Monitoring television, online platforms, and social networks reveals that the media aims to create new perspectives on history by constructing framework packages, focusing on diagnosing the past, and building understandings of the present. Another analyzed aspect is the musealization of memory, where the media treats stories as museum objects, illustrating the values of a bygone era. Through the notion of the small screen as a historical eye, television creates its own self-memory. Analysis of memory narratives indicates that nostalgia and drama are essential tools for their marketing. The analysis of this discourse leads us to the idea of "media as part of history."

FROM MONOPOLIZING MEMORY TO CO-CREATING IT: OPENNESS AND EQUITY IN THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

With the growing proliferation of digital media into the memory practices of cultural institutions and ordinary people, questions about a growing dependence on monopolistic technology companies on the creation, access and preservation of collective memory have emerged. For cultural institutions that rely on social media to boost their audience engagement, this also means that they lose part of their role as public educators, while ordinary people fear the loss of ownership over their personal memories. This paper proposes equitable approaches to the current digital ecosystem, that is built on the extraction and profit-making of personal data, that can be developed by looking beyond the current market, envisioning possibilities for related policies that could enable the re-design of the current memory ecosystem towards social inclusion. The argument is based on a combination of ethnographic research into initiatives that foster the openness of knowledge by enabling fair practices to be realized in the competitive sphere of the digital economy. Building upon work such as the MyData and the DECODE project, as well as enquiries into personal memory practices of youth living in Germany and the UK.

Центр по изучению Сталинградской битвы: вчера, сегодня, завтра

The article presents some of the results of the Center for the Study of the Battle of Stalingrad for five years of work. Information is given about published collections of documents and materials, encyclopedias and reference books prepared as a result of the interaction of scientific, educational, public organizations and cultural institutions dedicated to the history of the great battle on the Volga. The paper informs about the scientific seminars held at the Center on little-studied issues of the history of the Battle of Stalingrad. The study of genuine sources and the introduction into scientific circulation of arrays of archival documents are aimed at preventing the falsification of historical events, the formation of impartial judgments and the preservation of collective memory of the war.

Celebrating the National Unity in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes

Summary: According to Gabriella Elgenius, the societal significance of holidays lies in the preservation of collective memory. Annually repeated shared rituals reinforce the memory of those events and personalities that are expected to be familiar to all the members of the community, in effect pushing all other ones into the shadow of collective forgetting. What is more, the emotionally charged commemorations remind members of the community about their social ties and shared history, reinforcing their national identity. The same process occurred in the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where the key players exploited national ceremony to implement their (re)interpretations of the past (as the dark age of national dispersion and slavery to foreign masters) and their new agenda for the future. The Unification Day, celebrated on 1 December, as well as the other state holidays, were supposed to contribute to the formation and reinforcement of the narrative image of a community that defined itself as Us and feels like One. The purpose of the Unification Day was to stage national unity and collectively express the will to belong to a firm and lasting community, in order to make sense of the death of past martyrs who gave their lives for Vidovdan ideals. A nation-state cannot exist without national unity. Regretfully, the ruling elites in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes failed, for various reasons, to nationalise the collective memory of the past and construct an efficient, internalised nationalist ideology. Thus, the Kingdom entered history as the single nation-state without its own nationalism, which meant it was missing the greatest mobilisation force, one that in the modern period has proved itself stronger than geography or religion and more stable than political and economic interests. Even though at the end of the war the citizens of the newly established kingdom were all rooting for Yugoslavia, the new nationstate failed to create the Yugoslavians as a people. It would seem that up until King Alexander’s declaration of dictatorship it had channelled its powers, and even its violence, mostly into the creation of the Serbs.

Collective Memory on the First World War as Component of Transformation in Eastern Europe (on the example of Ukraine and Russia)

The article analyzes the problem of reproduction and preservation of collective memory about the First World War in the countries of Eastern Europe. There has been an emphasis on differentapproaches, which exist both earlier and at the present stage, at the formal and human levels. It identifies the First World War in the memory of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, emphasizes thecomponents and factors of change, and outlines the lessons that current generations must take to prevent such disasters in the future.

The custodian of memories: coronial architecture in nineteenth-century Melbourne

Synopsis: Coronial architecture emerged as a distinctive genre of legal architecture in Australia in the late nineteenth century. A defining feature of this typology was that forensic and architectural techniques were interwoven in the design of the courthouse. The use of a hermetically sealed glass screen to separate the mortuary from the inquest room instituted new techniques for inventorying the dead. This article examines how architectural techniques affected the way in which the coroner cultivated technical, intimate and spatial relations between the living and the dead. The focus of the article is the construction of a purpose-built coroner's courthouse in the city of Melbourne in Australia in 1888. The design of the courthouse constructed a forum for the living to view and converse with the dead, which had as its aim the preservation of collective memory. The article thus proposes that courthouse architecture in the late nineteenth century linked the performance of the office of the coroner to the role of custodian of memories of the dead.

Legalizing Collective Remembrance after Mass Atrocities

This book chapter explores the tension between the preservation of collective memory and another impulse that follows mass atrocity: the desire for justice. Because many judicial systems are heavily influenced by notions of individualism, they are by design ill equipped to accommodate collective memory. Traditional rules of evidence and professional conduct often exhibit a single-minded focus on the individual, replicating models that assume one client who autonomously makes legal decisions without consulting his or her community. Bound by these rules, attorneys must disrupt or even dismantle collective memory, thereby retraumatizing their clients. Here, I offer an alternative. I believe that human rights attorneys should instead endeavor to preserve and promote collective memory. For that reason, I urge a fundamental rethinking of the law’s preference for individual memory in the context of transitional justice. Indeed, I believe that incorporation of collective memory into certain judicial proceedings would better serve the goals of transitional justice by facilitating a more complete understanding of the collective harms of mass atrocity and advancing reconciliation.

The (Re)Collection of Memory after Mass Atrocity and the Dilemma for Transitional Justice

When a government engages in the mass killing of its own citizens, how can the nation ever recover? These atrocities destroy the moral fabric which binds a nation. To recover, this fabric must be remade. Many social scientists and legal scholars believe that developing collective memory – an enduring and shared memory of the events that help to heal the wounds of a tattered national conscience and prevent the recurrence of mass atrocities – is essential to such reconstruction. However, the preservation of collective memory is in tension with another impulse after mass atrocity: the desire for justice. Because notions of individualism and autonomy heavily influence legal institutions worldwide, they risk the destruction of collective memory. This friction constitutes a central dilemma in facilitating transitional justice.In this article, I urge a fundamental reconceptualization of the law’s preference for individual memory in the context of transitional justice. I argue that the inclusion of collective memory will facilitate a better understanding of the collective harms that characterize mass atrocities and will serve the distinct goals of transitional justice, including reconciliation, the creation of a historical record, nation-building, and legal reform. I further argue that human rights lawyers should act as preservers and promoters of collective memory. In doing so, they may be able to help heal wounds outside traditional justice tribunals – while at the same time providing essential assistance to these tribunals if and when legal proceedings do finally occur.