Memory ecologies

Abstract

The individual and collective and also cultural domains have long constituted challenging boundaries for the study of memory. These are often clearly demarcated between approaches drawn from the human and the social sciences and also humanities, respectively. But recent work turns the enduring imagination -the world view -of these domains on its head by treating memory as serving a link between both the individual and collective past and future. Here I employ some of the contributions form Schacter and Welker's special issue of Memory Studies on 'Memory and Connection' to offer an 'expanded view' 1 of memory that sees remembering and forgetting as the outcome of interactional trajectories of experience, both emergent and predisposed.

After Coal: Affective-Temporal Processes of Belonging and Alienation in the Deindustrializing Nottinghamshire Coalfield, UK

“…Drawing on the concept of habitus, Ingram ( 2011 , p. 289) states “when people share similar life experiences by, for example, growing up in a particular working-class neighborhood, they acquire dispositions in line with those of their families and neighbors. Moreover, scholars have recently sought an “expanded view” (Brown and Reavey, 2015 ) of memory, thinking more relationally between personal, familial, and social memory and highlighting the collective nature of emplaced recollections of shared pasts (Hoskins, 2016 , 2018 ). Returned to in the final discussion, there are limitations to autoethnographic enquiry, both applicable to all social research and specific to this study.…”

Toxic landfills, survivor trees, and dust cloud memories: More-than-human ecologies of 9/11 memory

“…After years of activist efforts to close the landfill in March 2001, the arrival of WTC debris reopened the 2600-acre site, transforming it into the somber burial grounds of these now “sacred remains.” According to Martin Bellow (2012), Director of the Bureau of Waste Disposal at the time, sanitation workers had to manage both the extended collection of “regular garbage” in addition to the incorporation of 9/11 remains (15–16). In this entanglement of ceremonial remains and quotidian trash, new conflicts emerged, reconfiguring the landfill’s “memory ecologies” (Hoskins, 2016).…”

Memorials as discursive spheres: Holocaust and Second World War iconography in public commemoration of extremist-right violence

“…Reviewing the palimpsest structure of memories interrelated with the experience of extremist-right violence might help to dispel the blurriness of the current phenomenon and to understand how far memories of extremist-right terrorism intersect with European Holocaust memory on the one hand and the discourse on postwar democracy on the other. In order to analyse this impact of public commemoration of extremist-right violence in the ‘new memory ecology’ (Brown and Hoskins, 2010; Hoskins, 2016), we focus on Germany as a case study, due to the crucial role Germany played in transforming the ‘divisive memory of Nazi aggression and occupation’ into a unifying memory culture that ‘lends legitimacy to the European Union’ (Kansteiner, 2006: 129, 130). We argue that authorities, local initiatives, and social and political agents, used Second World War and Holocaust-related iconography and terminology to shape these commemoration sites as instruments linking current Germany to the period of National Socialism in order to demonstrate the dangers of both extremist right-wing as well as National Socialist ideology, and illuminate the desirable character of the present democratic society.…”