Memory StudiesPub Date : 2026-04-14eCollection Date: 2026-04-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980251413210
Kateřina Králová, Nikola Tohma, Jessie Barton Hronešová
{"title":"The slow transformation of the collectivist education of child refugees from Greece in socialist Czechoslovakia.","authors":"Kateřina Králová, Nikola Tohma, Jessie Barton Hronešová","doi":"10.1177/17506980251413210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251413210","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Using a Slow Memory framework, which foregrounds sustained, reflective engagement with the past, this article examines the evolving institutional care provided to child refugees from the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) in socialist Czechoslovakia. Rather than interpreting their experiences primarily through trauma or rupture, the analysis focuses on the long-term everyday realities of life in childcare institutions, recalling both supportive and constraining aspects as remembered by the children and shaped by state authorities. Although these institutions were formally aligned with the post-1948 communist project of collectivist education, the study reveals considerable institutional inertia as traditional educational practices coexisted with emerging ideologized forms of socialization. Tracing how a temporary humanitarian intervention developed into a durable system of care and control, the article shows that the children's lives were shaped not only by political agendas but also by improvisation, routine, resilience, and enduring peer solidarity.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"19 2","pages":"654-669"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13082688/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147700122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2025-05-10eCollection Date: 2026-04-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980251334975
Amber Dean, Kara Granzow, Angela May
{"title":"Notes toward a methodology of haunting.","authors":"Amber Dean, Kara Granzow, Angela May","doi":"10.1177/17506980251334975","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251334975","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article considers the methodological implications of Avery Gordon's work on haunting for the field of memory studies. Like Gordon, we take issue with forms of positivist social-scientific research which fail to even acknowledge (let alone reckon with) ghosts. Specifically, we emphasize how these methodological orientations to research and knowledge production are thoroughly ensconced in Euro-western knowledge paradigms that rationalize colonialism. To do so, we draw on Indigenous studies scholars, many of whom have themselves expanded Gordon's approach to haunting. By bringing insights about haunting as a methodology to bear on the field of memory studies, we aim to provoke a wider conversation about haunting's usefulness, including its risks and limitations, as an approach to producing knowledge about violent pasts and their durability in the present.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"19 2","pages":"439-452"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13069995/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147677692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2025-04-28eCollection Date: 2026-04-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980251334965
Nicholas Forrest Frayne
{"title":"The consequences of Apathy: How Nyayo House becomes an actor for intergenerational solidarity amid the absence of state justice in Kenya.","authors":"Nicholas Forrest Frayne","doi":"10.1177/17506980251334965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980251334965","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the basement of Nyayo House, a government office tower in downtown Nairobi, hide abandoned torture chambers, built during the Moi Era to imprison political dissidents and enforce his authoritarian regime. Despite decades of memorial advocacy since the end of the Moi Era in 2002, these former torture chambers remain derelict and the recommendations of the Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (2008-2013) to memorialise the site continue to go unrealised. In 2024, youth-led protests against the current government erupted across Kenya, facing extreme state violence that echoed the 'dark days' of the Moi Era. From this, it is clear that transitional justice has been ineffective in Kenya; continuities between past and present injustices dominate the political landscape and manifest in both the youth calls for justice and the government's response. In this context, how might Nyayo House, as a site of violence and memory, function towards justice? This article argues that the absence of official memorialization turns Nyayo House into a discursive symbol for a <i>lack of justice</i>. As such, the site is untethered from its specificity, becoming an 'unbound symbol' that mnemonically organises intergenerational and intersectional forms of resistance to state violence today. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's concept of 'disenclosure' alongside qualitative interviews with survivors and young social justice advocates, this article proposes that this 'unbinding' capacity of an unmemorialised site of atrocity under a regime of ongoing state violence makes it a powerful force for claims for justice beyond a transitional justice paradigm.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"19 2","pages":"421-438"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13069997/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147677717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2024-10-09eCollection Date: 2024-10-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241262390
Samuel Merrill, Ann Rigney
{"title":"Remembering activism: Means and ends.","authors":"Samuel Merrill, Ann Rigney","doi":"10.1177/17506980241262390","DOIUrl":"10.1177/17506980241262390","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This editorial introduces the 12 articles collected in this special issue on <i>Remembering Activism: Explorations in the memory-activism nexu</i>s. It frames the articles within current debates in the field of memory studies and social movement studies on the entanglements between memory work, on the one hand, and activism directed towards social transformation, on the other. In particular, it highlights the ways in which the memory of earlier activism is mobilised within later movements; in the process, it also identifies various forms of activist memory work where remembrance is an integral part of the activist repertoire and one of the means used to achieve political ends.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"17 5","pages":"997-1003"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11486545/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142485978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2024-10-09eCollection Date: 2024-10-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241277517
Duygu Erbil
{"title":"Commodification anxiety and the memory of Turkish revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş.","authors":"Duygu Erbil","doi":"10.1177/17506980241277517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241277517","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the impact of commodification on the memory-activism nexus in relation to the cultural afterlife of Deniz Gezmiş. It reframes discussions of the 'commodification' of the revolutionary in terms of 'celebrification' and examines why this process generates social unease in Turkey. It shows that this anxiety emerges from the perception that once memory is brought into the circuit of exchange-value, it risks losing its use-value in activism. Cultural memory is indeed becoming increasingly mediated by market relations. Yet, this article calls attention to activist remembrance which occurs within the interstices of capitalist property relations and is therefore not necessarily <i>dependent</i> on the market. As such, it supports a shift from the 'passive consumer' paradigm to the recognition of the political and narrative agency of remembering subjects, demonstrating that people often contest processes of commodification, especially in the context of anti-capitalist activism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"17 5","pages":"1039-1055"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11481043/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142485977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2024-10-09eCollection Date: 2024-10-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241262391
Tashina Blom
{"title":"My body my choice: The hostile appropriation of feminist cultural memory in American anti-vaccine movements.","authors":"Tashina Blom","doi":"10.1177/17506980241262391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241262391","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article discusses how the reproductive rights slogan 'my body my choice' - which functions as a carrier of feminist cultural memory - was weaponised when it gained traction in anti-vaccine movements that appropriated it. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, transnationally coordinated groups associated with the far right and characterised by nationalist and pro-life values started using the protest slogan to politicise their resistance to local lockdown restrictions and vaccine and mask mandates. The article shows that their use of the slogan was a hostile form of mnemonic appropriation and analyses the discursive mechanisms used to discredit the reproductive rights movement. It demonstrates that when slogans become carriers of cultural memory, they can be used in claim-making by movements on opposing sides of the political spectrum. It concludes that protest memories can be used politically both in the advancement of social movement causes as well as in the backlash against those causes.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"17 5","pages":"1089-1104"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11481044/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2024-10-09eCollection Date: 2024-10-01DOI: 10.1177/17506980241263237
Sophie van den Elzen
{"title":"Solidarity: Memory work, periodicals and the protest lexicon in the long 1960s.","authors":"Sophie van den Elzen","doi":"10.1177/17506980241263237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241263237","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the lexical memory work performed by the British New Left as it differentiated itself from the organised labour movement post-1956. It argues that activists use memory to reframe the meaning of keywords in the 'protest lexicon', and that this is an important, though usually implicit, activist cultural practice. Based on previous work in conceptual history and cognitive science, it begins by situating lexical memory work as an activity on the border between narrative historical memory, semantic memory and implicit collective memory. It then discusses the resignification of the word <i>solidarity</i> during the long 1960s, when lexical work was a key feature of the New Left's apostasy from traditional Marxism. Finally, it examines the case of the British heterodox Marxist journal, <i>Solidarity</i>, outlining how it intervened in the protest lexicon by wrenching free the keyword <i>solidarity</i> from previous meanings, changing its historical referent and, ultimately, resignifying it.</p>","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"17 5","pages":"1073-1088"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2024-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11481006/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142485979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2023-12-29DOI: 10.1177/17506980231219586
Valentina Infante Batiste
{"title":"Pro-dictatorship memorialization in democratic Chile (1990–2020): How is it maintained?","authors":"Valentina Infante Batiste","doi":"10.1177/17506980231219586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231219586","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the combinations of conditions that explain the maintenance of pro-dictatorship memorialization in democratic Chile, where various pro-dictatorship memory sites, memorials, squares, and street names still positively commemorate the military dictatorship or associated elements (1973–1990). The study used four main explanatory factors and subjected them to a Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The procedure revealed that, in Chile, pro-dictatorship memory sites are maintained through two main paths. On one hand, “Walls” (veto players) block elimination demands and guarantee the pro-dictatorship sites’ maintenance. On the other hand, it is the combination of “Silence” (absence of human rights organizations denouncing the site) and “Local and/or Institutional Support” (protection granted by local communities or state agencies) that explain the maintenance of pro-dictatorship memorialization. These results reflect a unique sociological attempt to understand the phenomenon of pro-dictatorship legacies and their permanence in democracy.","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"143 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139146258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2023-12-29DOI: 10.1177/17506980231219596
William N Holden
{"title":"Gibsland, Louisiana’s memoryscape of Bonnie and Clyde: Putting the past in the present","authors":"William N Holden","doi":"10.1177/17506980231219596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231219596","url":null,"abstract":"A memoryscape is a place where memories are anchored in space. One cannot travel back in time to when an event occurred, but one can travel in space to where an event occurred. On 23 May 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed and killed near Gibsland, Louisiana, by a posse of law enforcement officers. There is a monument at the ambush’s location, and since 1993, there has been the Authentic Bonnie and Clyde Festival commemorating the ambush and culminating with its re-enactment. The re-enactment demonstrates putting the past into the present, and while watching it, one feels being taken back in time to when the ambush occurred and experiences living history. The ambush’s re-enactment commemorates not only the end of Bonnie and Clyde’s crime wave but also the beginning of the end of the Public Enemy Era.","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"108 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139146976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Memory StudiesPub Date : 2023-12-29DOI: 10.1177/17506980231219588
Philip McDermott
{"title":"Migrants, transcultural memory and World War I commemoration in post-conflict Northern Ireland","authors":"Philip McDermott","doi":"10.1177/17506980231219588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980231219588","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores a community memory project on World War I led by first-generation migrants living in Northern Ireland. As a location recovering from 30 years of political violence, debates on commemoration are frequently reduced to the bi-partisan lens of Irish nationalism or British unionism. World War I is one episode often interpreted through this exclusivist framework. Recent immigration, however, raises questions as to how those who are neither nationalist nor unionist can partake in public memory debates. Drawing on the project’s experiences, I argue that incorporating migrants’ worldviews on the past can elucidate important transcultural analysis and positively aid in reframing simplistic ethno-national interpretations. Transcultural methods can illuminate cross-cultural themes and explicate differences and similarities across multiple groups rather than just two historically divided communities. Thus, transcultural approaches offer a novel means of generating holistic dialogue on memory which has transformative potential for a society transitioning from conflict to peace.","PeriodicalId":47104,"journal":{"name":"Memory Studies","volume":"230 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139145552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}