Collective Memory: Conflict, New Media, and Community Agency

Abstract

The production and circulation of memory have experienced unprecedented global growth after the events of World War II and subsequent conflicts in the twentieth century. Conventionally promoted by governments, the construction of commemorative monuments, the creation of centers for recovering collective memory, and the formalization of memorable events exemplify this trend. On the other hand, civil rights organizations, scholars, and communities have contributed with very determined efforts to preserve the memory of their own populations and organizations, often at the margins of official activities whether by their own decision or by conditions of exclusion. Among factors that come simultaneously into play we find distrust in official or institutionalized versions of memory, new venues and media for accessing memories of communities which have been previously ignored, and the inclusion of new media for celebrating and remembering the past.

To approach the complexity of the creation of this memory, interdisciplinary frameworks are needed to contextualize the various cultural relationships and relate intergenerational collective memory with the use of media. This panel seeks to address possibilities, questions, and limitations that inform complex and symmetrical relationships between memories, the institutionalization of commemoration, participatory communities, and technological devices designed with the purpose of remembering. All possibilities for Social Studies of Science and Technology to provide new reflections on the production and circulation of collective memory.

Individual Presentations

• Epigenetics as Embodied Memory: The Benefits of Interdisciplinary Approaches - Sana Saboowala, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Radio Sutatenza: Collective Memory as a Facilitator of a Popular Education Project - Jorge Rojas-Alvarez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Memory for the Design of Possible Alternative Futures - Claudia Grisales-Bohórquez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Memory Labor and Nostalgia: When a Technology of Resistance Becomes a Tool for Control - Allan A Martell

Session Organizers

• Jorge Rojas-Alvarez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Sana Saboowala, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign