Prolepsis-or the narrative manoeuver consisting of narrating or evoking a future event in advance-is a concept borrowed from literary theory that has been used in Psychology for studying the contribution of culture and meaning to development. Cole applies the notion of prolepsis to upbringing insofar as parents' imagined goals vis-à-vis their offspring guide their educational childrearing, thus channelling the child's present towards the parents' imagined future. This view coincides with cultural psychology in that humans are considered as future-oriented beings, constructing cultural tools that mediate the way we interpret the world and act within it. Drawing from this theoretical framework, this paper applies the notion of prolepsis to collective memory in order to examine how imagined futures are brought into the present by means of particular ways of reconstructing the past, thus mobilizing collectives towards certain political goals. Along these lines, the narrative, pragmatic and normative dimensions of collective memory are discussed. The paper concludes with some reflections on the role of politics of imagination in promoting different ways of relating past, present and future.

Farage or the French Resistance of Le Pen -but because it seems more and more likely that they are bringing us back to the past as it actually happened -a past where populism successfully brought nationalist leaders to power. In this context, it seems particularly crucial to understand how we relate to our history, how we learn from it and the consequences it may have for the world we live in. These are the questions this special issue explores by adopting a cultural psychological perspective on collective memory -the lay representations of history -and proposing both theoretical and empirical contributions.In this editorial, we will try to first make the case for the political and social importance of collective memory. Second, we will argue why theoretical discussions -not just empirical research -are necessary to tackle these issues. Third, we will discuss the role we believe, cultural psychology should play in the current context and the dangers of turning it into a field disconnected from social and political realities. Finally, we will present the contents of this issue and how we hope it tackles some of the problems raised in this editorial. The social and political importance of collective memoryStating that collective memory studies particularly matter in today's post-truth world could be seen as a mere rhetorical move -after all, doesn't all expertise

This introduction to the special issue on conflict and memory aims to underscore the importance of memory (whether individual and collective) in relation to intergroup conflicts. We argue that the way in which societies reconstruct and bring the past into the present-especially, the historical past-is crucial when it comes to the study of intergroup conflict dynamics. In this regard, we also highlight the growing importance of memory studies within the area of social sciences as well as the multiple ways of approaching memory. Drawing from this wide theoretical framework, we introduce the articles of this issue, eight articles that tackle the role of memory in different conflicts, whether currently under way, in progress of being resolved, in postwar settings, or in contexts where conflicts expected to happen do not arise.

The aim of this paper was to bring the dialogical and multivoiced dimension of conflict to the fore in the study of how people remember a particular event in the past. Drawing from different case studies, it contains analyses of how subjects identifying with different political actors in the Basque conflict adopted their respective positions and interpretation of the conflict, and how, in light of same, they reconstruct the failed peace process that took place in 2006 between the terrorist group ETA (Euzkadi ta Azcatasuna, or Basque Country and Freedom in English) and the Spanish government. Results show that the positioning adopted by participants gives rise to a certain form of interpreting the conflict, which, in turn, affects how the peace process is remembered. This occurs within a particular argumentative context in which each version constitutes an implicit response to a competing interpretation of the peacemaking process. However, apart from this dialogical relationship between versions, we can also find an internal dialogicality within certain accounts of the peace process by which a dialogue between voices linked to different positions is established. The paper concludes with a discussion on the role of history teaching in promoting a more critical, reflexive, and pluralistic way of dealing with memory, and hence with conflict.

This paper explores collective memory and grief as they are experienced and expressed at modern memorial sites. What makes them collective is the way they are interpreted and felt as a 'we', in first-person plural. From a cultural psychological perspective, we conceptualize memorials as cultural and historical artefacts that mediate these processes and in so doing give meaning to the past based on present and future challenges. Along these lines, we analyse visitors' situated and evolving experiences of two memorial sites: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Ground Zero National September 11 Memorial in New York. Results focus on individuals' particular modes of experiencing and appropriating modern memorial sites, which in contrast to classic ones are purposely built to generate a wide range of different meaning-making processes and ways of interacting with them.