Memory Surrounding a Mausoleum: Transforming Spain’s Valley of the Fallen Into a Site of Conscience

Francisco Franco announced the construction of the Valley of the Fallen in 1940, a year following the end of the Spanish Civil War, and incorporated overt iconography that honored the struggle of Nationalists without memorializing the Republican victims during this war. This memorial distinguished the names of two fascist leaders, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and Franco, buried in the center of the basilica in 1959 and 1975, respectively. However, this site, as of June 2021, has failed to acknowledge the over 33,000 victims, both Nationalists and Republicans, interred in this site, many of whom remain unidentified. The signification of the Valley of the Fallen has transformed since the turn of the 21st century due to recent memory practices that increasingly commemorate Republican victims of the Spanish Civil War. This article illustrates how the persistence of memory and counter-memory practices have shifted the meaning of the Valley of the Fallen, creating a site of conscience through changes affecting place and space, particularly in light of Franco’s legacy.

The privatisation of remembering practices in contemporary inpatient mental healthcare: going beyond Agnes's Jacket

In this paper, we consider changes to memorial practices for mental health service users during the asylum period of the mid-nineteenth up to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The closing of large asylums in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, but their closure has led to a decrease in continuous and consistent care for those with enduring mental health challenges. Temporary and time-limited mental health services, largely dedicated to crisis management and risk reduction have failed to enable memory practices outside the therapy room. This is an unusual case of privatised memories being favoured over collective memorial activity. We argue that the collectivisation of service user memories, especially in institutions containing large numbers of long-stay patients, would benefit both staff and patients. The benefit would be in the development of awareness of how service users make sense of their past in relation to their present stay in hospital, how they might connect with others in similar positions and how they may connect with the world and others upon future release. This seems to us central to a project of recovery and yet is rarely practised in any mental health institution in the UK, despite being central to other forms of care provision, such as elderly and children's care services. We offer some suggestions on how collective models of memory in mental health might assist in this project of recovery and create greater visibility between past, present and future imaginings.

Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era

“Sites of Violence and their Communities” presents the results of a research project that brought together scholars and practitioners of memory work in an attempt to critically reinterpret the links between sites, their (human, and non-human) users, and memory. These interdisciplinary discussions focused on overlooked, repressed or ignored sites of violence that may benefit from new approaches to memory studies, approaches that go beyond the traditional focus on communication, symbolism, representation and communality. Clandestine or contested sites, in particular, pose challenging questions about memory practices and policies: about the status of unacknowledged victims and those who witnessed their deaths; about those who have inherited the position of “bystander”; about the ontology of human remains; and about the ontologies of the sites themselves, with the natural and communal environments implicated in their perdurance. Claude Lanzmann – one of the first to undertake rigorous research on abandoned, uncommemorated or clandestine sites of violence – responded to Pierre Nora’s seminal conception with his work and with the critical notion of “non-lieux de mémoire.” Methodologies emerging from more traditional as well as recently introduced perspectives (like forensic, ecological, and material ones) allowed team members to engage with such “non-sites of memory” from new angles. The goal was to consider the needs and interests of post-conflict societies; to identify and critically read unofficial transmissions of memory; and to re-locate memory in new contexts – in the grassroots of social, political and institutional processes where the human, post-human and natural merge with unanticipated mnemonic dynamics.

Memory and far-right historiography: The case of the Christchurch shooter

This article investigates far-right conceptions of history and memory through the case of Christchurch shooter. Scholarly work on far-right memory practices is still in its infancy, and research into the Christchurch shooter in particular has underplayed this crucial aspect of his ideological drive for violence. By investigating the narrative elements of his historiography, the article argues that far-right extremism taps into a range of historical templates to structure a trajectory of time and historical development that seeks to legitimize present violence in relation to the legacies and exemplary instances of the past as well as historically contingent aspirations for the future. The danger of this memory working is its utility—through the channels of digital culture and communication—in promising to canonize the terrorist as a historicized object in a chronicle of ancient struggle, providing temporalized purpose to his violence in both a retrospective and prospective manner.

FROM MONOPOLIZING MEMORY TO CO-CREATING IT: OPENNESS AND EQUITY IN THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

With the growing proliferation of digital media into the memory practices of cultural institutions and ordinary people, questions about a growing dependence on monopolistic technology companies on the creation, access and preservation of collective memory have emerged. For cultural institutions that rely on social media to boost their audience engagement, this also means that they lose part of their role as public educators, while ordinary people fear the loss of ownership over their personal memories. This paper proposes equitable approaches to the current digital ecosystem, that is built on the extraction and profit-making of personal data, that can be developed by looking beyond the current market, envisioning possibilities for related policies that could enable the re-design of the current memory ecosystem towards social inclusion. The argument is based on a combination of ethnographic research into initiatives that foster the openness of knowledge by enabling fair practices to be realized in the competitive sphere of the digital economy. Building upon work such as the MyData and the DECODE project, as well as enquiries into personal memory practices of youth living in Germany and the UK.

AS IN LIFE, SO IN DEATH: EMPLOYEE VALUES AND CONTENT PRESERVATION DURING PLATFORM CLOSURE

Despite dominant cultural narratives about platform vitality, whether their immense global penetration or companies’ overwhelming political and economic power, platform history is marked by shutdown and failure. Companies and sites shutter with an understated regularity. As they go, they often delete large swaths of user content, with consequences for the memory practices of both individuals and communities. In turn, this paper examines the ethical approaches that platform employees bring to the process of platform shutdown and user content deletion. This phenomenon is analyzed using 52 interviews with employees from now-shuttered platforms. Drawing on literature on values in technology, technological breakdown and decline, as well as from critical approaches to the study of platforms, this paper articulates the ways that platform employees understand the ethics of social media data deletion, and how these ethics come to shape what remains of these platforms after they close.

Routes to Forming an Affiliative Postmemory about Difficult Pages in History (Based on the Example of the Era of Political Repression)

This article discusses the mechanism behind the formation in adolescents (representatives of the 4th generation) of an affiliative postmemory about one of the most controversial and complex subjects in Russian history – the era of political repression from the 1930s to the1950s. The first part of the article is devoted to questions of methodology and necessity, and to the possibilities of using an authentic space and an authentic artifact as mediators between past and present in memory practices. The basic ideas are the concepts of “postmemory” by Marianne Hirsch, “grief” by Alexander Etkind, and “affective management of history” by Sergey Oushakin. Additionally, there are the ideas of Varvara Sklez, Veronica Dorman, Olga Strelova, and Alexander Kotlomanov in relations to that very authentic space and/or artifact which helps to provoke and form the memory of complex pages of history, not from within, but from without, enabling the creation of a kind of “sensory laboratory” for the period. Thanks to this “feeling”, dry information is experienced and appropriated by a person through the strong emotions provoked, and the level of individual affiliative memory of the era of political repression is built up. The second part of the article describes two experiments which allowed me to analyse the effects of an authentic space (an immersive drama performance) and an authentic artifact (an archived investigation casefile) on adolescents.

Memórias do centenário de Clarice Lispector nos acervos digitais / Memories of Clarice Lispector's centenary in digital collections

Resumo: Este artigo discorre sobre as práticas transversais da memória que circularam nas redes digitais durante a comemoração do centenário da escritora Clarice Lispector no ano de 2020. Nota-se que essas práticas acionam tanto acervos pessoais quanto editoriais da autora nas teias comunicacionais. Nesse ínterim, o fazer-memória se faz pela reapresentação das narrativas compreendidas nesses acervos. Assim, busca-se problematizar como essas práticas corroboram com a rememoração da autora e sua obra também na ambiência digital. Para tanto, aciona-se reflexões de estudiosos dos aspectos comunicacionais, arquivísticos e socioculturais da memória. Neste estudo de caso, adota-se como corpus os lançamentos comemorativos do site.claricelispector.ims.com.br, do Podcast da Clarice, da hashtag #365diasdeClarice nas redes sociais Facebook e Instagram e das edições especiais dos livros da escritora. Espera-se demonstrar como essas práticas comunicacionais e da memória podem contribuir para a renovação periódica do acervo literário e cultural de Clarice Lispector também no tempo presente. Palavras-chave: memória, acervo digital; literatura; centenário; Clarice Lispector. Abstract: In the meantime, memory-making is done by re-presenting the narratives included in these collections. Thus, the purpose is to comprehend how these practices corroborate the remembrance of the author and her work also in the digital environment. For this, reflections from scholars of the communicational, archival and socio-cultural aspects of memory are triggered. In this case study, commemorative inaugurations of site.claricelispector.ims.com.br, Clarice Podcast, hashtag # 365diasdeClarice on the social networks Facebook and Instagram and special editions of the writer's books are adopted as corpus. It is expected to demonstrate how these communication and memory practices can contribute to the periodic renewal of Clarice Lispector's literary and cultural collection also in the present time. Keywords: memory; digital collection; literature; centenary; Clarice Lispector.