Moving hearts : how mnemonic labour (trans)forms mnemonic capital

This study explores how memory forms may be understood through an economic lens tracing how the labour of remembering adds value to and (trans)forms memories. The study focuses on embodied memories and imaginaries of migration and belonging and the ways in which these are (trans)formed through mobile and social media witnessing into a collective living archive and into objectified memory forms that include art works and digital artefacts situated within global mnemonic commodity chains. Empirically, the article draws on an arts-based collaborative research project, ‘Moving Hearts’ carried out with the UK Migration Museum in 2016–2018 that examined embodied, artistic, and institutional memories and imaginaries of migration. Theoretically, the article builds on the growing body of research in memory studies on the economies of memory, bringing together a political economy approach to memory and work within participatory arts to provide insights into how memory forms may be understood through mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital. Specifically, it shows how the mnemonic labour of participants making, carrying and walking with clay hearts transforms memories of migration and belonging into new kinds of mnemonic capital

Remembering statelessness in food stories from Jewish Shanghai

Memories of food and foodways feature prominently in Willens’ memoir, and in analysing some of these, I have sought to highlight some of the contradictory experiences of statelessness for Jewish people in colonial Shanghai. Willens’ stories of food reveal difficult personal or communicative memories. Her stories also recount the experience of holding multiple and contradictory cultural identities as a stateless person that are sometimes fragmented and difficult to personally digest: these include her experience of discovering the false memory of her Romanian nationality, being part of the Jewish diaspora, living within a European concession, and being raised by Chinese servants while attending a French school. Stories of food in the memoir act as metonyms for complex memories of statelessness and the absence and impossibility of citizenship through blood, soil or naturalization as a Jewish person in Shanghai. The exploration of cultural memories of Jewish Shanghai also provides insights into the relatively unexplored tensions between colonialism and statelessness, which is a lacuna within narrative and memory studies. Attention over the past decade has been given to narratives and memories that may be connected, move, travel and migrate beyond national boundaries, thereby leading to cosmopolitan, globalized and transcultural memories. But my analysis of cultural memories within the complex and multi-layered city of Shanghai suggests the need to pay more attention to narratives that invite readers to imaginatively identify with, and indeed metabolize, the personal, social and cultural memories of others who have found themselves trapped by historical conflicts and unable to move, with no citizenship and no clear national identity, despite the privileges they enjoyed through colonial occupation. Historically, not just in China but in many countries of the world, Britain and other European countries left complex colonial legacies from occupation that involved privileged economic concessions for a minority, as well as forced migration and displacement. We might find in these places a collision of cultures, a mixing and intermingling of hybridized identities and memories that are easy to digest, that move. Yet we also need to be attentive, as this chapter suggests, to the fact that there will also be narratives and communicative memories that were clearly difficult to digest. It is through cultural memory forms – such as the memoir – that the complex legacies between Britain and China may be shared and metabolized into a transnational body politic

Transformative tales : theater storytelling, ethics and restitution

In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston wrote: “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you” (2010, 176). Yet, ethically speaking, does the told story relieve the agony of the inhumane condition-of a home and loves lost through war or conflict, of a childhood mutilated by child sexual abuse-since grief does not in itself diminish but rather we grow around its pain (Tonkin 1996, 10)? Perhaps, the restitutional potential of storytelling lies in its work to grow and sustain the human life of the self or community around the pain of the inhumane condition?

Rewilding memory

Rewilding memory provides the basis for a new theoretical and practical agenda to bring greater neurological human diversity and ecological diversity into research and teaching on memory, mind and media. The article develops the concept of 'more-than-human-memory' to refer to the co-construction of memories between diverse humans and the environment. The article draws on research that examined a transmedia corpus of 40 neurodivergent memory works (life writing, memoirs, autobiographical art, blogs and videos). It found that memory works by autistic people consistently remember the self in terms of the co-composition of human memories through and with the media and matter of environmental memories. The article explores the ways in which some autistic people's memory works decentre human memories through deep ecological memory, conversations with vibrant objects and memories of animating energies. The research suggests that such memories 'rewild' or eco-neuroqueer the human-centred and normatively biased assumptions of memory, mind and media that underpin psychology, philosophy of mind, media and memory studies. It contributes a new angle to research that addresses the dialogical relationship between what Barnier and Hoskins (2018) have termed 'memory in the mind' and 'memory in the wild'. It also goes beyond extended mind theory that understands human memory as enhanced and extended through non-biological tools and suggests the significance to memory of the more-than-human living world. Importantly, it highlights connections between autistic more-than-human-memories and the conceptualisation and practices associated with the more-than-human in research shaped by eco-psychology, Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities

'I can't breathe' : metabolising (im)mobile antisocialities

This chapter takes as its starting point the #Black Lives Matter slogan ‘I can’t breathe’ cycling through intersectional mediations and mobilisation to develop an emergent analytical framework for immobile antisocialities. It draws on multi-disciplinary approaches beyond media studies to create a conceptual framework that gives air to elements that are immobile and antisocial. The chapter asks, how do we understand the experience of interruption and amplified displacement arising from locative, temporal and social breakage experienced during stoppages of movement which we might conceptualise as immobile socialities? How do we understand what happens to sociality when movement and close contact between people is regulated and curtailed as in the 2020 COVID 19 lockdowns, as result of protests and blockades or as a result of police or security checkpoints? Two main ideas are suggested: the idea of a ‘respiratory ontology’ to suggest how mobility and immobility, sociality and antisociality give life to each other, and secondly, as part of this, the idea of radical antisociality

The journalist as memory assembler : non-memory, the War on Terror and the shooting of Osama Bin Laden

News of the shooting by US security forces of the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was broken via the micro-blogging site, Twitter. The event was significant in terms of marking a watershed in the intersecting practices of mobile and social media with journalism, with the Bin Laden story ‘marking a new reference point’ in media coverage (Filloux, 2011). I take this example to show how journalism in relation to memory and to media witnessing in particular now takes place within ‘a globital memory field.’ In addition, I suggest that the use of a range of modalities and points of contact by journalists and non-journalists to report events requires us to recognize the importance of journalism’s ‘incomplete, ambiguous, suggestive and unstable relays to the world’ (Zelizer, 201: 323)

Data, memory, territory

From inside the human body to the geospatial mapping of the globe, digitisation is transforming the dynamics of memory across and within territories. How can we develop new concepts to explain the mobilisations and (in)securities of data in relation to memory and territory? What methods and forms of analysis are being developed by researchers in the field of digtial media studies? This invited international symposium will provide a fora for researchers in this area, including training and workshops for postgraduate students on the 26 November 2012

Globital memory capital : theorizing digital memory economies

This chapter on globital memory economies develops our own original analytical framework for understanding digital and unevenly globalised memory economies. We use this framework to define and ‘see’ the uneven mnemonic economy of our digital devices beyond the screen, the hidden digital infrastructures required of them as well as the ethical imperatives of this economy in terms of addressing the uneven environmental impact on the planet. The aim of the chapter is to provide researchers and students with a conceptual and analytical overview that they can then apply in more detail to a wider range of case studies and empirical examples. In this way, we hope to contribute to a critical rethink of the commercial and public sector rhetoric surrounding digital media – including the associated digital-global memory this media creates – as essentially cheap, green, clean and abundant