Memoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined) NUBS 4.20
Jul 06, 2023 11:00 - 12:30(Europe/London)
20230706T1100 20230706T1230 Europe/London 6.17. Digital memoryscapes NUBS 4.20 MSA Conference Newcastle 2023 conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
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Revisiting the Multicultural Past between Silence and Speaking Out: New Actors in the Digital Memoryscape
Individual paperMemoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined) 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/05 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 22:00:00 UTC
The politics of remembering and forgetting has been one of the driving forces behind political reorientations in modern Turkey. Despite the various foci of conservative Islamist and secularist nostalgia for the Ottoman and early Republican eras, a common approach has been to regard ethno-religious minorities as passive objects. These communities' communal memory has largely reinforced this image by restricting memories of the past within the frames of their communal memory, with troubling fragments of a once-shared past kept as hidden memories and maintaining silence as an essential strategy reinforcing this memory politics. 
Corresponding to the opportunities provided by the digital transformation that allow for the pluralisation of voices in the public sphere, the self-described goal of Turkish digital actors emerging in the last decade was to offer alternative and, moreover, challenging perspectives to the dominant hegemonic portrayals of the past. The main objective of this study is to address the fundamental issue of whether and how this has been accomplished. 
To that end, after mapping current actors in Turkey's major ethno-religious communities who develop diverse narratives of the past on online-platforms, I will address the two main questions of what they represent as materials and narratives, as well as how they structure and manifest their motives and strategies of contestation against the broader national historiography as well as the established memory politics of their own communities. Following a content analysis of representations in their social media accounts, critical discourse analysis will enable us to discuss what allows them to fulfill their goal by expanding their message in social media and what appears to limit their sphere of impact that they initially intended.
In this regard, this analysis will contribute not only to the study of memory politics in Turkey by allowing us to see whether and how they expand the prevailing memory politics of ethno-religious minority communities, which are characterized primarily by silence, but also to the overall literature on online platforms as a means of alternative or counter-hegemonic memory politics.
Presenters
ÖC
Önder Cetin
Dr./ Research Fellow At The Department Of Knowledge In Transition, Leibniz-Institut Für Bildungsmedien | Georg-Eckert-Institut
Memory and Education in the Digital Age
Individual paperMemoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined) 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/05 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 22:00:00 UTC
This contribution explores the role of memory in today's teaching and learning, especially in (higher) education. While the paper engages with the relation between memory and identity, it is primarily concerned with the impact of technology (e.g. the Internet) on teaching methodologies and students' approach to learning and their ability to retain and recall information. 
The paper investigates to what extent educators reflect with students on the role of mnemonics and memory in the learning process: from the acquisition of notions (vocabulary, definitions, periodisations), and the processing of information (e.g. calculations), to the development of analytical and critical skills (e.g. intertextuality; the ability to distinguish between facts and fake news).
Whereas rote learning (memorisation) is widely condemned as not conducive to proper understanding or reflection, the overreliance on an external, 'digital', memory has hitherto received little scholarly attention in higher education. Several studies point to the positive impact of 'transactive memory' to group performance (Lewis, Lange & Gillis: 2005; Jackson and Moreland: 2009).[1] My paper, on the other hand, will investigate what happens when the group (or the transactive memory system) consists of a computer or the Internet, and learners (or users) who systematically rely on computational memory to retrieve information and remember. To what extent is the learners' ability to recall information weakened by this constant reliance? How is the quality of their learning process affected? 
[1] Moreland and Jackson define transactive memory as 'a shared awareness among group members of who knows what' (2009: 509).
Presenters
SC
Salvatore Campisi
Assistant Professor In Italian Studies, Durham University
Making Memory: Digital Spaces as Site of Performance
Individual paperMemoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined) 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/05 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/06 22:00:00 UTC
In this paper I work through questions concerned with performance and memory making in digital spaces. Performance here is not a staged or recited representation, instead it is approached as an activity, doing, engaging, enacting and affecting. I draw on two digital projects I have been involved with since 2015 and 2022, respectively, to explore the processes, affordances, tensions and discomforts surrounding digital memory work. The first is a small digital, open access archive (Clayoquot Lives: An Ecofeminist Story Web https://clayoquotlives.sps.ed.ac.uk/) which we created via the digital publishing platform Omeka. The archive holds oral histories, images and other materials related to the 1993 Peace Camp in Clayoquot Sound, Canada. In creating the archive, the value of doing was revealed as both intellectual activity and an embodied experience. The second is an examination of social media as a site for memory work. It explores how diasporic memory agents utilize social media to make visible the still largely forgotten and marginalized Assyrian genocide (the Seyfo). Social networking platforms are sites of discourse and civic engagement offering possibilities of strategic memory work and engaged visibility. Attention will be given to the critical making, the doing, of memory via digital technologies, the labour and care on which they depend, and embodied practices that allow these digital spaces to become sites of performance, transmission, remediation, enactment and interpretation of the past.
Presenters
MK
Martina Karels
Assistant Professor Of Media And Communication, St. Francis College
Dr./ Research Fellow at the Department of Knowledge in Transition
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Leibniz-Institut für Bildungsmedien | Georg-Eckert-Institut
Assistant Professor in Italian Studies
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Durham University
Assistant Professor of Media and Communication
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St. Francis College
Senior Lecturer
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Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
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