Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media

Mobilising Mediated Remembrance

Samuel Merrill, Emily Keightley, Priska Daphi, Samuel Merrill, Emily Keightley, Priska Daphi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030328269
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030328276
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

This collected volume is the first to study the interface between contemporary social movements, cultural memory and digital media. Establishing the digital memory work practices of social movements as an important area of research, it reveals how activists use digital media to lay claim to, circulate and curate cultural memories. Interdisciplinary in scope, its contributors address mobilizations of mediated remembrance in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, India, Argentina, the UK and Russia.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. Merrill et al. (eds.)Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital MediaPalgrave Macmillan Memory Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Digital Memory Work Practices of Social Movements

Samuel Merrill¹ , Emily Keightley² and Priska Daphi³

(1)

Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

(2)

Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

(3)

Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

Samuel Merrill (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Emily Keightley

Email: [email protected]

Priska Daphi

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Three decades of developments in digital media have had considerable implications for many aspects of social, cultural and political life. These include their sustained impact on social movements and cultural memory . This book is the first to be specifically dedicated to exploring the nexus between social movements, cultural memory and digital media . In particular, it is concerned with understanding how recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and digital media , including web 2.0 internet capabilities and social media platforms, shape memory work in social movements. Rather than seeking to focus attention on either social movements, cultural memory or digital media , it aims to explore the relations between them. To facilitate this, each of the volume’s contributions attempts to address all three of these dimensions. The book aims to bring into closer exchange three expanding academic agendas that have so far addressed different pairings of these three phenomena: the relation between cultural memory and social movements, social movements’ use of digital media and digital media ’s implications for cultural memory .

With this broader aim in mind this introductory chapter reviews the efforts already made to investigate these connections. The first section discusses those studies that have previously examined the relations between social movements and cultural memory . A second section reviews the growing body of literature that addresses the link between cultural memory and digital media . The third section elaborates the research dedicated to the connections between digital media and social movements. We then present the digital memory work practices of social movements as one means by which to consider the overlaps between these three areas of enquiry and, building on those research efforts most relevant to the volume’s overall goals, introduce three examples of such practices related to mnemonic claims, circulations and curations. We use the distinction between claiming , circulating and curating practices as a means to structure and introduce the different contributions to the volume.

Social Movements and Cultural Memory

The fields of social movement studies and cultural memory studies have recently begun entering into a more substantial dialogue with one another. Both constitute interdisciplinary endeavours that have significantly grown and consolidated over recent years (see Della Porta & Diani, 2015; Dutceac Segesten & Wüstenberg, 2017). Set against a contemporary period of intense and varied forms of protest , anchored in both physical and digital space, a growing number of social movement and cultural memory scholars are exploring the connections between their fields of study. New strains of research within social movement studies are increasingly exploring the role of memory as a cultural substratum that, besides other things, can influence mobilisation and contribute to the formation of social movement identities. At the same time, working towards similar goals but in the opposite direction, a new agenda in memory studies is emerging that explores activist movements as a context of cultural remembrance. Still, the two fields have explored the interface of cultural memory and social movements in slightly different tenors. Social movements scholars have tended to be concerned with the study of cultural memory with the aim to understand its impact on social movement and protest dynamics and outcomes. Cultural memory scholars meanwhile have been more likely to approach social movements as a context within which understanding mnemonic processes such as remembrance and commemoration is an end in itself. Currently, these two approaches are increasingly being reconciled (see Daphi & Zamponi , 2019), not least by those scholars working across the boundaries between these fields, and by those who better acknowledge the earlier research that has seen memory and social movement scholars engage with each other’s primary scholarly terrains.

The earliest studies of socially constructed memory, as epitomised by Halbwachs ’ study of collective memory (1992) rarely considered issues of protest and activism . This changed during the latter stages of what has been termed a second phase of memory research, which commenced from the 1980s onwards and primarily targeted national frames of analysis (see Feindt, Krawatzek, Mehler, Pestel, & Trimçev, 2014). At this time memory scholars started to draw greater attention to the forms of activist ‘memory work’ underpinning efforts to gain representation for so-called counter-memories —those relating to marginalised groups and events which challenged dominant, officially endorsed memories—often via their commemoration and memorialisation in public space (see Bosco, 2004; Hajek, 2013; Till , 2005, 2008; Wüstenberg, 2009). This interest in activist memory work and the movements that form around specific mnemonic claims has carried through the field to contribute to a new research agenda within a new third phase of memory research characterised by transcultural and transmedial frames of analysis that exceed the level of the state (De Cesari & Rigney, 2014; Erll & Rigney, 2009). Within this third phase a new focus on forms of mnemonic resilience and resistance has been billed as offering the opportunity to address the dominance of studies of traumatic memory within the field (Reading & Katriel, 2015). In this vein activist memory work, or—as it is now also often referred to—‘memory activism ’, has gained particular influence within the study of the role that memory and commemoration play within the political processes of conflict transformation , resolution and reconciliation (see Fridman, 2015; Gutman, 2017).

In social movement studies, the onset of a cultural turn from the late 1980s (see Baumgarten, Daphi , & Ullrich, 2014) placed growing emphasis on the study of how activists make sense of themselves and their environment. Early in this turn, scholars focused on the interpretative dynamics and patterns of social movements, particularly in terms of framing processes (see Snow & Benford, 1988) and collective identity building (see Taylor & Whittier, 1992). Later, scholars increasingly emphasised the necessity to take a broader approach to culture by going beyond cognitive dimensions and examining culture not only as a specific subset of movement dynamics, but as meaning underlying all movement activities (for an overview, see Ullrich, Daphi , & Baumgarten, 2014). In this context, emotions (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001), narratives (Polletta, 2006), rituals (Juris, 2008; Flesher Fominaya, 2014) and the more implicit practices of social movements received growing scholarly attention. Against this background, research about movements and memories has increased over the last years (see Armstrong & Crage, 2006; Baumgarten, 2017; Daphi , 2017; della Porta, Andretta, Fernandes, Romanos, & Vogiatzoglou, 2018; Doerr, 2014; Zamponi , 2018). This research has also resonated with calls to pay greater attention to the temporalities of movements (see Gillan, 2018) and to strengthen research on continuities between different cycles of mobilisation (see Zamponi & Daphi , 2014).

With social movement studies and memory studies scholars now increasingly concerned with the overlaps between their fields, the movement-memory interface has been conceptualised in different ways, including in terms of activists’ autobiographical memories , the communicative memories expressed within social movement and activist interactions, and the broader societal memories of movements, protest s and activism (see Daphi , 2017; Kubal & Becerra, 2014). Beyond that, three dimensions of the relationship between movements and memory have gained particular prominence of late (for an overview see Daphi & Zamponi , 2019). The first, as already mentioned, concerns how activists contest and reformulate certain memories (as captured by the concepts of activist memory work and memory activism ); the second relates to how past movements, activism and protest s are remembered (sometimes referred to as the memory of activism and movements or activist memories (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Digital Memory Work Practices of Social Movements
• Part I. Claims
• Part II. Circulations
• Part III. Curations
• Back Matter