- Kings College,
University of London
Strand Campus
The Strand
London,
UK
Anna Reading
King's College London, Culture, Media and Creative Industries, Faculty Member
- Loughborough University, Social Sciences, Department MemberUniversity of Glasgow, Centre for Cultural Policy Research, Department MemberWestern Sydney University, Institute for Culture and Society, Department Memberadd
- I am an author, activist and academic. I am Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College University... moreI am an author, activist and academic. I am Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at Kings College University of London, UK and Visiting Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney.edit
Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggle: Powerful Times marks a new trajectory in Memory Studies by examining cultural memories of nonviolent struggles. The book highlights the cultural forgetting and memory of Gandhi's Salt March, the... more
Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggle: Powerful Times marks a new trajectory in Memory Studies by examining cultural memories of nonviolent struggles. The book highlights the cultural forgetting and memory of Gandhi's Salt March, the suffragette struggle in Britain, the Russell Tribunal, 'House Museums' in Europe, the anti-nuclear campaign at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, Poland's Solidarity movement, cultural repatriation and indigenous Australians, the Anti-War museum in Berlin, a South Asian community archive, peaceful alternatives in video games and Palestinian activism against The Wall. The essays explore how memories of nonviolent struggles are mobilized through digital archiving, documentary film-making, video-gaming, and on-the-ground practices such as music, memorial museums, and the building of monuments. By foregrounding an alternative line of memory work whose goal is to commemorate nonviolent struggles in contemporary local, national and global memory cultures, the book opens up new pathways of human hope and agency to the study of cultural memory.
Research Interests:
A collection of essays that examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink established conceptualisations of human memory in terms of its discourses, forms and practices. Contents: Introduction PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY... more
A collection of essays that examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink established conceptualisations of human memory in terms of its discourses, forms and practices.
Contents:
Introduction
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Contents:
Introduction
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Research Interests:
This work challenges contemporary thinking on memory by examining the complex ways in which the social inheritance of the Nazi Holocaust is gendered. It considers how the past is handed down in the US, Poland and Britain through... more
This work challenges contemporary thinking on memory by examining the complex ways in which the social inheritance of the Nazi Holocaust is gendered. It considers how the past is handed down in the US, Poland and Britain through historiography, autobiographies, documentary and feature films, memorial sites and museums. It explores the configuration of socially inherited memories about the Holocaust in young people of different cultural backgrounds. The book provides an approach to understanding the significance of gender in relation to cultural mediations of history.
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Examines Polish women's oppression before, on the cusp and after the collapse of communism. This book analyzes the relationship between Solidarity, state capitalism, nationalism and feminism, combining historical sources, sociological... more
Examines Polish women's oppression before, on the cusp and after the collapse of communism. This book analyzes the relationship between Solidarity, state capitalism, nationalism and feminism, combining historical sources, sociological data, propaganda, Polish literature with lesser known underground sources, illustrations, photographs and interviews. The first part covers Polish women and history, language, work, family, law, male violence, sexuality, culture and politics. The rest of the book includes more than 40 interviews with women as they talk about their lives. It also examines the Polish feminist movement in the 19th century, during the inter-war years, under state capitalism and in the 90s.
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First describes the principal media industries in contemporary Britain, including publishing, the press, broadcasting, music, cinema, advertising, and new media. Then analyzes media policy, examining the impact of the state, the European... more
First describes the principal media industries in contemporary Britain, including publishing, the press, broadcasting, music, cinema, advertising, and new media. Then analyzes media policy, examining the impact of the state, the European Union, and grassroots campaigns on the structure and activities of media. Finally, analyses a range of different media and cultural texts with a view to illustrating the wealth of approaches and methods which can be drawn on to understand the contemporary media scene.
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Social networking sites have in the past few years become extremely popular, and have turned the web into a markedly social medium. However, online social networking has led to concerns about privacy, as well as about possible... more
Social networking sites have in the past
few years become extremely popular,
and have turned the web into a markedly
social medium. However, online social
networking has led to concerns about
privacy, as well as about possible counterproductive
effects on making new realworld
acquaintances. These effects are,
in the short run, aggravated by permanent
mobile connectivity. In the long
run, however, mobile social networking
might actually enhance real-world connections,
with persons in your physical
vicinity able to introduce themselves on
the screen of your handheld. Privacy,
anonymity, virtuality, friendship– the topic
of mobile social networking clearly invites
philosophical, and, in particular,
ethical discussions. The volume contains
papers by, among others, Charles Ess,
Leopoldina Fortunati, Richard Harper,
James E. Katz, Rich Ling, Anna Reading and Kurt
Röttgers.
See Anna Reading
The Playful Panopticon?
Ethics and the Coded Self in Social Networking Sites
few years become extremely popular,
and have turned the web into a markedly
social medium. However, online social
networking has led to concerns about
privacy, as well as about possible counterproductive
effects on making new realworld
acquaintances. These effects are,
in the short run, aggravated by permanent
mobile connectivity. In the long
run, however, mobile social networking
might actually enhance real-world connections,
with persons in your physical
vicinity able to introduce themselves on
the screen of your handheld. Privacy,
anonymity, virtuality, friendship– the topic
of mobile social networking clearly invites
philosophical, and, in particular,
ethical discussions. The volume contains
papers by, among others, Charles Ess,
Leopoldina Fortunati, Richard Harper,
James E. Katz, Rich Ling, Anna Reading and Kurt
Röttgers.
See Anna Reading
The Playful Panopticon?
Ethics and the Coded Self in Social Networking Sites
Research Interests:
Examines the transitions in East Central Europe through the prism of broadcasting. Preface Introduction A Crisis of the Critical Project Totalitarianism and the Media Media Theory and the Decline of the Communist System Negotiated... more
Examines the transitions in East Central Europe through the prism of broadcasting.
Preface
Introduction
A Crisis of the Critical Project
Totalitarianism and the Media
Media Theory and the Decline of the Communist System
Negotiated Revolutions
The Fate of Civil Society
The Struggle over Broadcasting Law
The Emerging Media Systems
Conclusions
Understanding the Transition
Preface
Introduction
A Crisis of the Critical Project
Totalitarianism and the Media
Media Theory and the Decline of the Communist System
Negotiated Revolutions
The Fate of Civil Society
The Struggle over Broadcasting Law
The Emerging Media Systems
Conclusions
Understanding the Transition
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The chapter examines the long genealogy of feminist work both in theory and through feminist activism concerned with the impact of technologies on gender and memory. It then discusses how gender and memory technologies are understood... more
The chapter examines the long genealogy of feminist work both in theory and through feminist activism concerned with the impact of technologies on gender and memory. It then discusses how gender and memory technologies are understood within the field of memory studies to suggest that this area is one which is less studied in relation to how the digital and the global are both impacting on memory. It argues that while there are reconceptualisations of memory that recognise the importance of flow and movement there is a gap in terms of research that provides an understanding of how unevenly globalised digital technologies and human digitality are transforming gendered memories and memories of gender. What is needed, argues Reading, is not only a new theory of memory from a feminist perspective in the light of digitisation and globalisation, but also new methods that can trace the trajectories of memories across hitherto bifurcated mnemonic domains of the organic and mechanic, the private and the public, the local and the global in new ways.
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This chapter develops the idea of the ‘feminist mnemonic imagination’ as a critical tool to dis-embed the knowledge practices of the mnemologist in the Globital Age. The chapter examines human imaginaries of gender and memory at... more
This chapter develops the idea of the ‘feminist mnemonic imagination’ as a critical tool to dis-embed the knowledge practices of the mnemologist in the Globital Age. The chapter examines human imaginaries of gender and memory at significant historical points in which revolutionary mnemonic technologies were invented. Anna Reading shows the entangled ways in which memory, gender and new technologies are imagined within the domain of literary utopias from late medieval or early Renaissance fiction, including Christine de Pisan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Thomas More’s Utopia through to 20th century exemplars such as Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night and The End of This Day’s Business, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Marge Piercy’s A Woman on the Edge of Time.
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In most Polish literature women are holes to be filled in by men: in the poetry of Anna Swir women are whole by themselves. Swir’s work, which bridges the interwar and state capitalist periods, provides one example of how some Polish... more
In most Polish literature women are holes to be filled in by men: in the poetry of Anna Swir women are whole by themselves. Swir’s work, which bridges the interwar and state capitalist periods, provides one example of how some Polish writer-women, despite the limitations of censorship, challenged dominant sexual stereotypes and forged new connections between different women. Anna Swir collectively re-presents the autonomy and self-determination of women and goes way beyond the League of Women or the state in terms of the subject matter she tackled and the styles she chose to use.
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In Britain to successfully arrange to speak with a real government minister requires the tenacity of a non-specific virus. Even if you do manage to endure the fifty-seventh rendition of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ whilst being left on hold... more
In Britain to successfully arrange to speak with a real government minister requires the tenacity of a non-specific virus. Even if you do manage to endure the fifty-seventh rendition of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ whilst being left on hold for two days and then manage to repeat your enquiry for the fifty-eighth time to yet another department, there are still those final door-keepers, the secretaries, pp.
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This chapter compares digital memories of the human body and birth gained through obstetric sonography with early 20th-century accounts of pregnancy and childbirth. It examines the particular transformations to human memory through the... more
This chapter compares digital memories of the human body and birth gained through obstetric sonography with early 20th-century accounts of pregnancy and childbirth. It examines the particular transformations to human memory through the practice of sharing digital memories of the foetus on mobile and social media. The chapter traces the mnemonic practices associated with sharing ultrasound images across six trajectories of the globital memory field to bring to the surface the complex and contradictory mnemonic transformations taking place. Although the practices have clear medical, social and cultural benefits, Reading argues, their impact is uneven—globital—and involves not only the evident marginalisation of women’s organic memories but also the erasure of girls and women in India and China—a new gendercide.
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When US and UK troops invaded Iraq in 2002 many of the Iraqi National Museum’s 5,000 year old treasures were destroyed and looted. The then U.S Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was quoted as saying, ‘freedom’s untidy, and free people... more
When US and UK troops invaded Iraq in 2002 many of the Iraqi National Museum’s 5,000 year old treasures were destroyed and looted. The then U.S Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was quoted as saying, ‘freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.’ The reopening of the museum in Bagdad in 2009, established in 1926 by a British woman, Gertrude Bell, was hailed as a return to stability: a national public memory institution on the road to democracy
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While research has addressed the ways in which autism is represented in popular culture, in literature and in film, this article points to how autistic cultural assemblages afforded by the unevenly global-digital or globital age act to... more
While research has addressed the ways in which autism is represented in popular culture, in literature and in film, this article points to how autistic cultural assemblages afforded by the unevenly global-digital or globital age act to queer neurotypical communication and media ethics more broadly. The article argues that evidence points to the emergence of new human communication ethics that embraces neurodiversity and that values the sensorial, perceptual, cognitive and communicative variety of human meaning making as well as including the communicative affordances of non-human persons and our environment. . Since communication and ethics are configured through a culture of ‘normalcy’ this article asks how images about, by and with people with autism invite a reorientation of ethical assumptions about images more widely. How do new kinds of digital images of autistic people made possible through the affordances of the globital age trouble or rather unsettle not only a history of t...
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Historical events and social memories are increasingly articulated and accessed through the means of interactive digital technologies. Particularly in the context of history museums, interactive digital media kiosks and web-sites are used... more
Historical events and social memories are increasingly articulated and accessed through the means of interactive digital technologies. Particularly in the context of history museums, interactive digital media kiosks and web-sites are used to enhance and in some cases constitute a key way in which the past is conveyed to the public. Yet in what ways are new technologies in such contexts constructing a different relationship to the past and how are visitors themselves using these technologies? This article uses empirical research from the Museum of Tolerance in the US to critically situate and theorize the uses of new technologies in relation to socially inherited memories of the Holocaust.
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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... more
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-centre...
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" Social networking sites have in the past few years become extremely popular, and have turned the web into a markedly social medium. However, online social networking has led to concerns about privacy, as well as about possible... more
" Social networking sites have in the past few years become extremely popular, and have turned the web into a markedly social medium. However, online social networking has led to concerns about privacy, as well as about possible counterproductive effects on making new realworld acquaintances. These effects are, in the short run, aggravated by permanent mobile connectivity. In the long run, however, mobile social networking might actually enhance real-world connections, with persons in your physical vicinity able to introduce themselves on the screen of your handheld. Privacy, anonymity, virtuality, friendship– the topic of mobile social networking clearly invites philosophical, and, in particular, ethical discussions. The volume contains papers by, among others, Charles Ess, Leopoldina Fortunati, Richard Harper, James E. Katz, Rich Ling, Anna Reading and Kurt Röttgers. See Anna Reading The Playful Panopticon? Ethics and the Coded Self in Social Networking Sites "
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How do we understand the relationship between memory and place in the context of Extended Reality (XR) migration museum exhibitions? The study combines a global mapping of XR within migration museums, a user analysis of Cologne’s virtual... more
How do we understand the relationship between memory and place in the context of Extended Reality (XR) migration museum exhibitions? The study combines a global mapping of XR within migration museums, a user analysis of Cologne’s virtual migration museum, and practice-led research with the UK Migration Museum to argue that XR places in Web 2.0 constitute a multiplication of memory’s significant localities. These include a migration memory’s place of beginning (the location of a migrant experience), the place of production (where the memory is transformed into representation) and the place of consumption (where the mediated memory is engaged with, looked at, heard). Mnemonic labour involving digital frictions at each of these sites constitutes a form of multiple place-making with complex feelings, meanings, and (dis)connections. This points to an innovative approach to understanding and curating XR experiences with museums that recognises the significance of the labour of place.
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When the young artist, Charlotte Salomon, handed over to a friend more than 700 illustrations of her childhood family experiences during Nazi policies with the words ‘Keep this safe: It is my whole life’ (Salomon cited in Felstiner,... more
When the young artist, Charlotte Salomon, handed over to a friend more than 700 illustrations of her childhood family experiences during Nazi policies with the words ‘Keep this safe: It is my whole life’ (Salomon cited in Felstiner, 1997:ix) she was signalling that neither her life nor her memories were safe from annihilation and obliteration. Charlotte died in Auschwitz extermination camp where sources indicate that at selection, two-thirds of women were sent immediately to their deaths (Felstiner, 1997:206). Although Charlotte was murdered, her friend kept her ‘whole life’ safe and so we at least have Charlotte’s legacy.1 Her account, an extraordinarily original combination of words and pictures in vivid gouache, details the contradictions of her particular experiences, not as a Jew, but as a young German-Jewish woman. What this book has argued is that experiences such as Charlotte’s were the rule rather than the exception during the Nazi Holocaust. In historical accounts of the past, in autobiographies, in documentary and feature films, in memorial sites and museums, in accounts that are both individually and socially produced, gendered identities need to be integrated as a major factor in understanding how individuals and socially inherited memories of the events are constructed, mediated and (dis)articulated.
In 2012 in western Sydney, Australia, I met up with a group of heritage activists to carry out a ‘docuprotest’ at a derelict site in Parramatta that is Australia’s oldest continuous site of institutional female containment. Ivy covered... more
In 2012 in western Sydney, Australia, I met up with a group of heritage activists to carry out a ‘docuprotest’ at a derelict site in Parramatta that is Australia’s oldest continuous site of institutional female containment. Ivy covered the windows and the perimeter wall. A noisy colony of fruit bats nested in the eucalyptus trees. Rusted padlocks prevented access to the buildings. We were given a tour of the buildings and grounds by women activists who, as girls, had lived at the site when it was a girls’ orphanage in the 1980s. We took photos and videos to record in situ the stories of the women, as they held up old photos relating to the site, as well as plans, and lists of ‘internees’ that dated back to the 1840s. They described to us the horrendous daily abuse they had themselves survived at the hands of adults and the authorities in the 1980s (see Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project, 2014).
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In the science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, first published in 1976, Marge Piercy envisaged a future society in which the characters would have ‘kenners’, mobile communication and personal memory prosthetics strapped to the... more
In the science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, first published in 1976, Marge Piercy envisaged a future society in which the characters would have ‘kenners’, mobile communication and personal memory prosthetics strapped to the wrist and connected to a world wide electronic network. In March 2006, Piercy’s kenner, in effect, became a reality when Nokia announced its 4G mobile phone designed to strap to the user’s wrist.
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Across a woman’s breasts rests a gun with ‘Sex and Gun Shop’ in bloodied letters; this is the sign in the centre of Lodź. Jolanta Litwinowicz and I follow the arrow, step inside the shop and browse; we look first at the giant blow up... more
Across a woman’s breasts rests a gun with ‘Sex and Gun Shop’ in bloodied letters; this is the sign in the centre of Lodź. Jolanta Litwinowicz and I follow the arrow, step inside the shop and browse; we look first at the giant blow up dolls; next a plastic saddle with a lurid green and orange penis; then a row of breasts; followed by multi-coloured condoms in a variety of shapes with a selection of magazines and photos. On the opposite wall hang knives and guns, and under glass lie lines of nerve sprays, alarms and gas guns (to defend ourselves, perhaps, against attack on those night hikes through the city).
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A language may be an adhesive force binding a nation together: it may also seal and bind women’s lips. A language is a whole body of words and the method of communication used by a nation, people or race. It may include other methods of... more
A language may be an adhesive force binding a nation together: it may also seal and bind women’s lips. A language is a whole body of words and the method of communication used by a nation, people or race. It may include other methods of expressing thoughts, feelings or wants, such as sign language or body language, as Shakespeare aptly noted, ‘Thers a language in her eye, her cheeke, her lip’.1 In his Confessions Saint Augustine gave his view of language: As I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs I used them to express my own desires.2 Language here is seen as a neutral system of words, nouns or signs, transparent or true, which expresses and communicates thoughts and desires with each sign unambiguously referring to an already existing fact.
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A language may be an adhesive force binding a nation together: it may also seal and bind women’s lips. A language is a whole body of words and the method of communication used by a nation, people or race. It may include other methods of... more
A language may be an adhesive force binding a nation together: it may also seal and bind women’s lips. A language is a whole body of words and the method of communication used by a nation, people or race. It may include other methods of expressing thoughts, feelings or wants, such as sign language or body language, as Shakespeare aptly noted, ‘Thers a language in her eye, her cheeke, her lip’.1 In his Confessions Saint Augustine gave his view of language: As I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs I used them to express my own desires.2 Language here is seen as a neutral system of words, nouns or signs, transparent or true, which expresses and communicates thoughts and desires with each sign unambiguously referring to an already existing fact.
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I am singing as I write this. For more than 30 years songs from Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK have been an important part of my personal memories of nonviolent political struggle. In this chapter I examine the articulations... more
I am singing as I write this. For more than 30 years songs from Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK have been an important part of my personal memories of nonviolent political struggle. In this chapter I examine the articulations of my personal memories of Greenham Common Women’s Camp within and through the wider cultural and digital memories of what became one of the most internationally known peace camps in the 1980s against nuclear weapons towards the end of the Cold War. In particular, I examine how the cultural memories of nonviolent struggle are articulated through the songs that Greenham Common women created and shared that have since become further globalized through digital cultures. I explore the memories of the collective forms of cultural production embedded in the songs as well as the images and language of nonviolence present in some of the songs. I draw on a personal archive that I collected in 1987 as part of an honours thesis at the University of York (Reading, 1987) as well as the publicly available digital archives of the songs articulated through online websites, and the re-embodied memories of women reconnected through social networks that include Facebook and Youtube. I explore how the ‘connective memories’ (Hoskins, 2009) of Greenham Common’s Women’s Peace Songs are articulated through the combined dynamics of globalization and digitization conceptualized here and elsewhere in my work as ‘the globital memory field’ (Reading, 2011a).
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Gazing from the outside in Part I it seemed that women could not represent themselves, speak for themselves. They were firmly tied within the apron strings of history, left on the threshold of language, fossilized within the monumental... more
Gazing from the outside in Part I it seemed that women could not represent themselves, speak for themselves. They were firmly tied within the apron strings of history, left on the threshold of language, fossilized within the monumental distortions of state capitalism, muffled by the Solidarity flag.
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The cloud is a metaphor that helps to obscure the material realities that rest beneath our digital memories. However, a number of scholars in memory studies have suggested that cultural memory has always had a material basis and some,... more
The cloud is a metaphor that helps to obscure the material realities that rest beneath our digital memories. However, a number of scholars in memory studies have suggested that cultural memory has always had a material basis and some, though limited, scholarly attention has already considered the toxic by-products and unethical practices involved in mining minerals that are used in making digital memories. This article draws on earlier work on the materiality of cultural memory as well as Tsing's (Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, 2005) concept of ‘friction’ in global commodity chains to help analyse our own empirical research in Australia and Malaysia that looks at the production of rare earth minerals, whose use in making digital communication technologies is not widely known. Our analysis concludes that that not all citizens are equally bearing the burden of the risks and damages caused by our growing desire and addiction for information and communication gadgets and digital memory. We argue that any conceptualization of digitized and globalized or ‘globital memory’ must resist metaphors, narratives and concepts that attempt to remove digital memory from its material consequences; to do this scholars must incorporate an understanding of memory's materialism into their research, rather than focusing predominantly or exclusively on its energetic or ‘virtual’ properties.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Supply Chain Management, Malaysia, Mobile Phones, and 11 moreSustainable Supply Chain, Rare Earth Elements, Computers, Pollution, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Digital Media and Memory, Communication and media Studies, Globalisation and Culture, Phosphors, Continuum, and Rare Earth Metals
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This article intervenes into research on cultural and digital memory by arguing for the significance of the materiality of memory and its underlying political economy. Although cultural and digital memories are characterized as contested,... more
This article intervenes into research on cultural and digital memory by arguing for the significance of the materiality of memory and its underlying political economy. Although cultural and digital memories are characterized as contested, multiple and often involving interplay and conflict between different power dynamics, what remains missing is an understanding of the material basis of digital, globally connective memory or what is termed here ‘globital memory’. In work on memory which addresses social and mobile technologies there is an emphasis on the transition from collective to ‘connective memory’ and the ways in which social media offer possibilities for the articulation of marginalized memories, as well as new forms of archiving. While current concern is signalling a return to the question of the significance of ‘mass media’ in relation to social and mobile media and digital memory, this work does not yet address the political economy of ‘globital’ memory which includes the...
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482 Media, Culture & Society 21(4) of the Holocaust. As Ofer and Weitzman in Women and the Holocaust emphasize: 'Nazi policy targeted all Jews as Jews, and the primary status of Jews was their "race" not their... more
482 Media, Culture & Society 21(4) of the Holocaust. As Ofer and Weitzman in Women and the Holocaust emphasize: 'Nazi policy targeted all Jews as Jews, and the primary status of Jews was their "race" not their gender' (1998: 2). Yet an approach that takes gender into ...
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Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is ‘right to memory’: the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through... more
Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is ‘right to memory’: the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions. This article outlines the rationale for a right to memory and why the debate is of importance to memory and cultural studies. It outlines some of the relationships understood between memory and identity within memory studies, suggesting that a right to memory requires an understanding of the complex dynamics of memory and identities not only within, but internationally across, borders. It extends the concept of political cosmopolitanism to use as an analytical framework to enable an analysis of current international protocols, showing how they formulate the discursive relationship between identity and memory in four ways that involve a number of contradictions and unresolved te...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Gender Studies, Digital Humanities, Photography, Digital Media, and 14 moreMobile Technology, Family, Gender, Digital Memory, Mobile Phones, Mobile Communication, Gender Identity, Memory, Multimedia Networking, Social Context, Camera Phone, Humanities and Social Sciences, Mobile phone, and Pilot study
The dynamics of digitisation and globalisation are synergetically and dialectically changing the ways in which human beings individually and collectively capture, document, share and preserve memories of the past. This paper develops... more
The dynamics of digitisation and globalisation are synergetically and dialectically changing the ways in which human beings individually and collectively capture, document, share and preserve memories of the past. This paper develops further the concept of the "globital memory field" with a discursive overview of the development of "digital memory" and the significance of zero in the meaning and practice of digital memory. The paper then explains the key elements of this epistemology, with an emphasis on the significance of zero or nothing in relation to two contrasting examples of the medical imaging of the human fœtus to the capturing and sending back to Earth by NASA's Curiosity robot images from the surface of Mars.
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This afterword asks why it is that the social within social movement studies, cultural memory studies and digital media studies tends to dominate and occupy a place of conceptual centrality and significance that remains opaque. To... more
This afterword asks why it is that the social within social movement studies, cultural memory studies and digital media studies tends to dominate and occupy a place of conceptual centrality and significance that remains opaque. To problematise this, I develop a sense of what I term the antisocial memory assemblage, suggesting the need to surface the antithesis of connection and all that is social. How are digital media platforms disruptive and destructive, far from engendering the social? In what ways are cultural memories of social movements necessarily social? Are political movements sometimes antisocial and disconnected? I look at how the social and antisocial may queer our understanding of sociality and refer positively to being disconnected and isolated; of being alone; as well as highlighting how being socially connected can also lead to non-progressive, divisive, disruptive and destructive political movements. I re-examine the studies in this book through questioning the assu...
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The dynamics of digitization and globalization are synergetically and dialectically changing the ways in which human beings individually and collectively capture, document, share and preserve memories of the past. This paper develops... more
The dynamics of digitization and globalization are synergetically and dialectically changing the ways in which human beings individually and collectively capture, document, share and preserve memories of the past. This paper develops further the concept of the 'globital memory field' with a discursive overview of the development of 'digital memory' and the significance of zero in the meaning and practice of digital memory. The paper then explains the key elements of this epistemology, with an emphasis on the significance of zero or nothing in relation to two contrasting examples of the medical imaging of the human fœtus to the capturing and sending back to Earth by NASA’s Curiosity robot images from the surface of Mars.
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Perhaps it is no accident that the word ‘usher’ — which nowadays we associate with the person who shows us our seats in the cinema — has its etymological roots in the phrase ‘the keeper of the door to the bones’.1 Though the practice of... more
Perhaps it is no accident that the word ‘usher’ — which nowadays we associate with the person who shows us our seats in the cinema — has its etymological roots in the phrase ‘the keeper of the door to the bones’.1 Though the practice of gathering in the darkness of the tomb of our ancestors around their bones to listen to genealogies is less common,2 in late capitalist mass-mediated cultures people gather together in the dark cave of the cinema to watch on the flickering screen, among other stories, the filmed memories of various pasts. This chapter explores gender and the making and configuration of socially inherited memories in the medium of film. I look at how gender is articulated in propaganda film, liberation footage, documentary and feature films about the Holocaust.3
The Globytal: Towards an Understanding of Globalised Memories in the Digital Age Anna Reading Abstract Within memory studies most understandings of memory are configured around ideas of personal memory and community memory, with the... more
The Globytal: Towards an Understanding of Globalised Memories in the Digital Age Anna Reading Abstract Within memory studies most understandings of memory are configured around ideas of personal memory and community memory, with the latter framed in terms of, ...
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... more
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 ...
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction The 'Wrong' Question: Historiographies The Demolition of a Man: Autobiographies Moving Memories: Propaganda, Documentary and Holocaust Feature Films The Absence of Women's Hair: Memorial... more
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction The 'Wrong' Question: Historiographies The Demolition of a Man: Autobiographies Moving Memories: Propaganda, Documentary and Holocaust Feature Films The Absence of Women's Hair: Memorial Sites and Museums Grandma's Tales: Young Peoples Configurations of Holocaust Memory Conclusion: (Dis)Articulations of Gender, Culture and Memory Bibliography Index
Preface Introduction A Crisis of the Critical Project Totalitarianism and the Media Media Theory and the Decline of the Communist System Negotiated Revolutions The Fate of Civil Society The Struggle over Broadcasting Law The Emerging... more
Preface Introduction A Crisis of the Critical Project Totalitarianism and the Media Media Theory and the Decline of the Communist System Negotiated Revolutions The Fate of Civil Society The Struggle over Broadcasting Law The Emerging Media Systems Conclusions Understanding the Transition
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The traditional playground game of generations of children ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ anticipates a metaphor for time that is neither teleological nor digitally networked, but expressed dynamically in terms of folding. If it is Two... more
The traditional playground game of generations of children ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ anticipates a metaphor for time that is neither teleological nor digitally networked, but expressed dynamically in terms of folding. If it is Two O’clock, Three O’clock, Four O’clock or any other O’clock, the players may creep towards the big bad Wolf, who has her back turned, with the aim of touching the wall first. But, if the wolf turns and howls that it is ‘Dinner Time’, the players shriek and run like hell to escape being eaten, and the horror of becoming the big bad Wolf themselves. Children delight most not in O’ clock Time but in weathering the consequences of the unpredictable Dinner Time. The enjoy the moment of devouring, of terror, of pleasure and fulfilment (for the wolf); of fearful transformation, of the process of becoming for the losing player, and of rapid movement that is not pinned to a particular time, but is experienced as anytime or perhaps all times folded together. This tumultuous, changing and dynamic sense of time, is perhaps why the philosopher Michel Serres delights in the fact that in French the word for time (temps) is the same word for weather (1995).1
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Research Interests:
‘Students are like entrails,’ one student remarked, ‘and the Polish education system like a sausage machine. We’re filled up with lots of cereals and very little meat.’ At the English Department of the University in Lodź, at which I... more
‘Students are like entrails,’ one student remarked, ‘and the Polish education system like a sausage machine. We’re filled up with lots of cereals and very little meat.’ At the English Department of the University in Lodź, at which I taught in 1988/9, the majority of students are women, many of whom go on to teach in local secondary schools. The building itself was once a secondary school and during the war it was used by the Gestapo. In the classrooms students sit still behind desks in rows: the round table is absent here. Classes begin at 8.00 a.m. and end at 6.00 p.m.; there are regular tests and examinations as students are graded and sorted; and there is no open access to the small department library. Thus students have little time and few resources to explore their own ideas. First two university teachers talk of their lives, followed by some of the students they teach.
The intricate linkages between power and knowledge shape human identities. Identity is fluid and a construct of various technologies of power being exercised on individuals that turn them into objects and subjects. The later Foucault... more
The intricate linkages between power and knowledge shape human identities. Identity is fluid and a construct of various technologies of power being exercised on individuals that turn them into objects and subjects. The later Foucault demonstrates subject formation through two major technologies- ‘domination’ and ‘self’. This paper uses Foucault’s opus as a toolbox to analyse the process of socio-cultural change among the Nicobarese, an isolated indigenous community of India, in the context of their post tsunami subjectification through the governmental humanitarian interventions. It concludes these interventions as tacit maneuvers of modernization which reconfigured the Nicobarese subjectivity through a politics of spatiality, and ushered change in their traditional socio-cultural fabric. In Foucauldian understanding, the post tsunami humanitarian interventions were an ensemble of the technologies of power which envisaged the Nicobarese transformation along the lines of a modern culture. The indigenous practices, decisions and aspirations were conducted by government in such a manner that the community started conducting its own conduct through the technologies of self.
