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Scanderbeg is the main constitutive figure in the collective memory of Arbereshs in particular and of Albanians in general. As such he also is the main figure in the history of Albanians that inspired many artistic and scholarly works in different disciplines including oral tradition, history, literature, ethnology, etc. The main aim of this paper, as indicated in the title, is to see how songs on Scanderbeg could be acertained as an expression of collective memory, longing, and belonging up to the present times. In order to comprehend better this process authors will give information on who was Scanderbeg, who were Arbëresh and how did they establish and maintained awareness on their distinctive cultural and ethnic identity. What was the role of Scanderbeg in this process? Beside this the role of folk songs and historical data on remembering Scanderbeg and in constructing Arbwresh/Albanian national identity will be juxstaposed. As a tool will be used three folk songs collected by Arbëresh intellectual Jeronim De Rada, which are related to two main events of Scanderbeg’s life, namely marriage and death, and these will be compared with historical data as found for same events in the Harry Hodgkinson’s historical book about Scanderbeg. This juxtaposition will be analysed in the context of Anthony D. Smith’s concept on ethno-symbolism in order to enlighten the initiation of Arbëresh/ Albanian ethnic identity. The final attempt of this paper will be to theorize on how historical facts, transformed in both oral tradition and scholar interpretations, are used in shaping collective memory-(ies) that forge identity-ies of groups in different temporal and spatial levels, i.e. local, regional, ethnic and national, in which case construction process and selectivity are quite prominent. The method used here is comparison of different literature resources (historical, literature, ethnographies) and interpreting them in different theoretical frameworks such as ethnosymbolism, collective memory and constructivis national building.

Mahé, nestled in the Mahé district of the Puducherry Union Territory in India, holds profound historical ties to French colonial India. Unlike the broader Indian subcontinent, which witnessed fervent anti-colonial movements against British rule leading to political decolonisation in 1947, Mahé experienced a belated political awakening, reluctantly integrating into the Indian Union in 1954. Despite the withdrawal of the French, the enduring legacy of French colonial ideology and culture continued to shape the ethos of Mahé. In contemporary times, a significant presence of French nationals in India, particularly in Pondicherry, Karaikal, and Mahé, has fostered the evolution of a unique linguistic identity known as Indian French. Within Mahé, landmarks such as St. Teresa’s Shrine, the Statue of Marianne in Tagore Park at Cherukallayi, remnants of St. George Fort, and sculptures inspired by M. Mukundan’s novel “On the Banks of the Mayyazhi” stand as tangible vestiges of the erstwhile French presence. Serving as repositories of bygone French culture, these sites emerge as dynamic arenas of memory production. Notably, Tagore Park in Mahé, adorned with fictional documentation through sculptures, assumes a pivotal role as a space that harmonizes memory and history, functioning as a reservoir for collective memory concerning French colonial rule. Mahé’s deliberate urban planning reflects a nuanced approach, embodying the concept of a living testament to French colonialism rather than a conventional museum. This architectural strategy underscores the deliberate preservation and commemoration of Mahé’s historical past. Through interviews with French nationals residing in Mahé, this research explores how these landmarks have become pivotal in the production of memories and the construction of identities for the French community in India and Mahé. Leveraging Maurice Halbwachs’ theoretical framework, the study unveils the intricate interplay between collective memory and present-day identity formation, shedding light on the transformation of personal memory into historical memory and its subsequent amalgamation into collective memory. With close to 50 French families residing in and around Mahé still, the study involves interviews with ten families, focusing on landmarks like St. Teresa’s Shrine, the Statue of Marianne, the ruins of St. George Fort, and sculptures based on one of M. Mukundan’s novels. So, through interviews of the French citizens of Mahé, this paper highlights how the cultural artefacts and popular landmarks of Mahé become sites of memory of the French colonisation.

This paper examines the role of community interventions in post-conflict settings. The focus is on peacebuilding through the shaping of collective memories, achieved through the transformation of social ties. By addressing community interventions, this paper opens the black box between interventions by formal institutions (such as peace treaties, trials, or truth commissions) and outcomes. It is based on a study of one specific cross-community initiative in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which – in 2012 – employed a Transitional Justice Grassroots Toolkit. Document analysis is complemented by interviews with participants and organizers to reveal the role of pedagogical practices, mediated by cohort effects, in facilitating cultural transformation through group interactions. This paper suggests how community interventions can change collective memories, cultural trauma, and related identities of the conflict, away from their polarized and polarizing forms, and it explores implications for future peace and social justice.

Neighborhoods and urban contexts are full of potential hidden inside them in an intangible form and can be used for their development and sustainability. Therefore, studying, discovering, and using them can help revive worn and historical textures. These mental factors include things not in the city’s outward appearance but in its heart and memory. The mindscape of the city includes everything that has meaning for its residents. Collective memories lead to strengthening their sense of belonging. The sense of belonging and collective memory is one factor that promotes social participation in the neighborhood and urban contexts. Social involvement is an efficient factor in facilitating neighborhood management, attracting investment, and helping environmental issues. Finally, it plays an influential role in sustaining life in urban contexts. Despite the plans that have been made to promote the sense of collective memory and increase the sense of belonging to the place, Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood has yet to achieve its growth and prosperity as in the past. Therefore, this paper focuses on studying how mindscape can help the sustainability and development of cities. The research method in this paper is based on document study, the review of documents related to prominent research in the fields of objective landscape, place identity, sense of place, and surface, and was carried out by descriptive-analytical research method. The method of collecting information is in two forms: documentary and field. Field information will be collected through two questionnaires (see Appendices A and B) from residents and experts. In this research, after reviewing and studying the documents and analyzing the field data, we present the proposed model of the influential factors of the mental landscape in the sustainability of urban contexts and draw the following conclusions: The concept of the mindscape holds significant importance in the context of creating sustainable cities and communities. It encompasses belonging, collective memories, and factors promoting social participation. Safeguarding and nurturing collective memory, the sense of place, belonging, and social participation are crucial in sustaining the mindscape and ensuring the long-term well-being of urban environments. By prioritizing these elements, cities and communities can foster a stronger connection between residents and their surroundings, resulting in a more vibrant and resilient urban fabric.

The paper explores the design interstices within consolidated media structures. These are spaces occupied for unprecedented use in case of emergency or dramatic events. The authors analyze some significant experiences developed on different levels, from initiatives by individual citizens to organizations such as the collective Bellingcat. These alternative uses of media contribute to the creation of what Michel Foucault called counter-memory: discourses parallel to the official ones that arise as forms of resistance from people who are marginalized by power. Overall, the paper provides a detailed and insightful look at the possibilities offered by digital design interstices in the creation and preservation of collective memories.

Throughout history, wars and armed conflicts have severely impacted cultural heritage, erased collective memories, and left entire populations seemingly non-existent. However, recognizing the significance of cultural heritage is the primary impetus for its subsequent reconstruction. Since the Syrian war outbreak in 2011, Aleppo, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited urban centers, has suffered significant damage to its historic sites such as shrines, khans, and other architectural treasures due to bombings and clashes. In 2017, a study by the Directorate of Antiquities and Museums in Aleppo revealed that over 70% of the city’s historic center was destroyed. As a result, the cultural heritage of Aleppo and its social and symbolic values have been threatened. This represents a huge loss not only to Syria but also to the international community. This paper explores the significant role that collective memories play in shaping a city’s identity in the aftermath of war. The research aims to analyze the best approach for intervention during the reconstruction phase, whether it be preservation, restoration, enhancement, or eventual reconstruction by reviewing some international experiences. Furthermore, it explains the current situation of the old city of Aleppo and presents some cultural buildings that have been severely damaged or destroyed during the conflict. The study will compare the essential values of each case study and finally conclude with suggestions about the suitable intervention of different case studies that represent the values mentioned before.

Place is an aggregate of meanings based on the emotional connection between people and a physical locality, fraught with social and cultural significances. It provides a spatial anchor for memory construction, value perception, and emotional experience for individuals and groups. Among the variegated factors that contribute to the construction of place, collective memory assumes a prominent role. On the one hand, local material conditions and landscapes provide clues and references to the past, essential for the construction of collective memory. Conversely, collective memory is embedded in the ongoing negotiation and production of locality and spaces, which contributes to specific ways of narrating a fluid and dynamic place identity. Taking Xinzhuang Village in Binchuan County, Yunnan Province as a case study, this article analyzes the process of place reconstruction based on local collective memory in the context of red tourism development, focusing on its specific spatial manifestations of memory and analyzing how collective memory participates in the production of local cultural identities. The fieldwork results show that different local actors in the village participate in the remaking of collective memory differently and with different priorities. The reconstruction of collective memory is accompanied by the continuous negotiation of identity, social relations, and communal organization. Collective memories give rise to shared patterns of everyday life and symbolization: reconciling the relationships between different groups. Specific attributes of place provide the basic building blocks of collective memory, which in turn reshapes material spaces and local cultural performances. Place identity, and vice versa, continuously strengthen collective memory in the construction of a red tourism destination. Collective memories facilitate the creation of a renewed local context. In this context, collective memories are performed and regenerated in embodied practices such as rituals and tourism behaviors, which constantly inject new cultural connotations into place reconstruction. At the same time, collective memory continuously guides spatial practices and the production of social and material spaces. This paper concludes that place elements not only trigger the recall, storage, and recreation of memory in the context of red tourism but also express the local characteristics, cultures, and identities reconstructed by collective memory. In this process, the landscape construction of Xinzhuang village endows collective memory with stability and persistence, and we argue that place concretizes and contextualizes collective memories. Thus, the interaction between memory and place both enhances the place identity and memory, especially for those who inhabit the place. The cultural landscapes, and local discourses constructed by collective memory have become the most significant local attributes in the process of expressing placeness. In response to the view that the place is understood as continuous change and dynamic construction, this paper understands collective memories as fluid, dynamic and socially negotiated, and clarifies the dialectical, mutually constitutive relationships between place and memory. It addresses the relative dearth of research on the construction and reconstruction of collective memory from the perspective of place and place identity.

In On Media Memory; Collective Memory in New Media Age, cultural memory is described as “a version of past, defined and negotiated through changing socio-political power circumstances and agendas" (qtd. in Bosh TE 3). The popular entertainment of every age is obliged to incorporate elements of cultural memory in it to remain popular. The paper seeks to interrogate the role played by the integration of cultural memory in the popular American science fiction web series, Stranger Things, and the latest production of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Miss Marvel. The Stranger Things series, written and directed by the Duffer brothers is set in the mid-1980s. The age is recreated through certain elements that constitute cultural memory. They are placed within the context of the Ukraine crisis which urgently necessitates anti-Russian narratives in American popular entertainment. Miss Marvel appeared as a fresh wind in MCU, questioning the collective mistrust towards the Pakistani Muslim community and addressing the scars of partition as well as migration in third-generation Pakistani-Americans. The two web series featured on Netflix and Disney Hotstar are compared and contrasted to elucidate how popular entertainment can act as a soft power for the retention and deconstruction of cultural memory.

The indigenous communities of Canada have transmitted their traditional knowledge of survival from one generation to another through oral storytelling sessions since the pre-colonial times. This knowledge has remained encapsulated within their collective communal memory in the form of stories of ancestors, tales of tricksters, dream-vision narratives, ceremonial songs, and ritualistic recitals. But forces of Euro-Canadian colonization have encroached upon their right to autonomy through a coercive imposition of the colonizers' language (English) and the colonizers' medium of expression (writing) upon them. The starkly different consciousness of ‘history’ that governs the worldviews of the dominant and the dominated have only served to aggravate the imbalance of power even more. The late twentieth century has seen the literary productions of these communities’ strife to reclaim their cultural and thereby political autonomy by inscribing the ‘oral’ within the ‘written’ and reworking the semiotics of the foreign tongue, imposed upon them to incorporate the specific nuances of their traditional language-culture within it. By looking into Ravensong (1993) and Whispering in Shadows (2000) penned by writer-activists Lee Maracle (Salish) and Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) respectively, this paper aims to explore the subversive potential of this collective cultural memory in resisting the colonial atrocities, the erosion of identity and the political disempowerment that has plagued the Native-Canadian existence for centuries.

The current paper is based on a research which was carried out in the public Chinese-Hungarian bilingual school in the 15th district of Budapest. The bilingual school transmits cultural memory by organizing activities such as traditional Chinese festivals and rituals and integrating practices. The main objective of the paper is to present and to interpret the Festive ritual elements and those kinds of rituals that constitute the school’s symbolic field of memory

This paper focuses on the discursive framing of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Croatian online media in order to examine the extent to which discourses about refugees crossing borders in 2015/2016 were informed by Croatia’s recent history and collective memory of the 1990s war. The paper is particularly interested in the local population’s perception of and reactions to the arrival of refugees. The analysis shows that the so-called refugee crisis, which dominated the European and world media in 2015/2016, triggered memories and narratives of the Croatian population’s own experience of displacement and forced migration, due to its own – not so distant – experiences of war. These local discourses defy the usual pro- and anti-refugee discourses that were present in other societies in Europe where refugees were arriving, due to a different historical memory and experience.

This paper intends to underline the importance of historic public spaces as the deposits of collective memories, proposing the critical analysis, reinterpretation, and systematization of relevant informative historical layers as a counter model to the globalizing tendencies and their fast pace of transformation. Baharestanis a historic square located in the northeast of Tehran’s Historic Center, and it is the home to Iran’s Parliament and the Ministry of Culture. It makes the square significant at the national level, especially due to its location surrounded by several exquiste historical heritage buildings. However, following the decline of Tehran’s historic center, Baharestan lost its socio-cultural vitality and spatial quality, hosting urban functions mainly heterogeneous to its identity, and eventually turning into a traffic node. Through the comparative study of numerous historical documents, and adapting the concept of “palimpsest”, Baharestan Square has been interpreted as the assemblage of different city layers in relation to the environmental and socio-political narratives of the city. The shift from one layer to another intends to reflect some of the lost memories of Tehran and its collective identity in the transition from traditional to modern society. Later on, the paper argues how this palimpsest quality and co-evolution of those plural layers and narratives in Baharestan demonstrate this symbolic square as a “catalytic social infrastructure”, giving Tehran an opportunity to overcome the challenge of “social amnesia” and promoting its civic culture and cohesion.

Particularly in coverage of unresolved conflicts, mass media news of both the one-to-many broadcast era and the new networked era are not guaranteed to sufficiently provide the historical and analytical depth required for publics to understand these infinitely complex tensions in their respective cultural and temporal context. Mass media news coverage of the day, however, does perpetuate mediated images that seek to affect how publics contextualize and collectively remember simmering cultural conflicts into the future, afar and close to home. This article conducts a small-scale theoretical review of the theories of collective memory and agenda-setting, complemented by an analysis of mass media news coverage and literature on unresolved conflicts concerning the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) and “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. This interrogation, in light of theoretical conceptions of dominant news discourses, offers an explanation as to how publics may come to understand ongoing conflicts in the external world. In shaping understandings of unresolved conflicts by publics, mass media news can play a biased role in making certain political tensions affectively salient for the preservation of a nation’s collective past by attempting to influence how compassion is evoked from publics in the present and even into the future. While certainly historically and geopolitically situated, a commonality exists between the unresolved conflicts of the FLQ terrorist attacks in Québec, Canada and the Troubles in Northern Ireland: nationalist cultural tensions, ones that simmer cyclically until discontent erupts between players on opposing sides. Although apparent collectives can seek out countless contemporary alternative sources of information in the digital era of abundance, this paper argues that collective memory remains significant in the context of scrutinizing how mass media news problematically sets biased agendas, which then promotes quite different historical worldviews of deeply complex conflicts.

Introduction. The paper investigates interactions between memory projects — both all-Russia ones and those implemented in regions bordering Kazakhstan. Special attention is paid to the unfolding narratives underlying annual commemoration ceremonies in Orenburg and Volgograd oblasts for Yestekbay Batyr (hero of war against Dzungars) and for soldiers/officers who participated in the Great Patriotic War, military conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Goals. The work aims to describe memorial objects associated with individuals who performed exploits for the sake of their compatriots, and to analyze commemorative practices carried out by local communities. Results. The article focuses on activities of local Kazakh communities of Orenburg and Volgograd oblasts aimed at memorializing war heroes collected by our research group during field studies of places sacred to Kazakhs, summarizes the authors’ observations and stories recorded from informants. Acts of commemoration for warriors are somewhat re-readings or re-inclusions of the past into the present-day agenda. Such venerations articulate significant ethnic values, norms, and behavioral patterns. The work traces a certain trend towards ‘militarization of consciousness’ in commemorative practices associated with particularly revered places of memory relating to the Great Patriotic War — and in sacralizing names of soldiers/officers who have taken part in local military conflicts.

This paper is based on an ethnographic study carried out during the Zagreb- Vukovar cycling marathon to the Remembrance Day commemoration. The commemoration of the fall of Vukovar, one of the key elements of the Croatian narrative of the Homeland War, attracts thousands of people from all over Croatia each year. I analyse the social production of the memory of the fall of Vukovar, a town which experienced some of the worst destruction during the 1991-1995 war. As a result, this paper assesses the interaction of various arenas of memory present in Vukovar, such as political and official discourse, commemoration, popular culture and historical narrative. Of particular interest is the relationship between individual and collective memory, belonging and space.

The Nigerian Middle Belt is the epicentre of violent conflicts between Fulani herders and sedentary farmers over land and agricultural resources called eco-violence; existing research has not adequately addressed the persistence of these conflicts. Using Social Representations Theory (SRT), this paper examines empirical case studies conducted in April 2018 and May 2022 in Benue State, Nigeria, to determine why these conflicts persist. The paper argues that contending parties anchor, objectify, and socially represent past contestations in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Nigeria in present-day realities and events in the Middle Belt, leading to the re-experience of collective memories and their consequences on people’s violent collective behaviour. Consequently, people resort to violence to redress present grievances viewed through the prism of past events. To promote sustainable peace when tackling deeply-rooted conflicts, it is essential to comprehend the historical context and the significance of collective memory while employing a comprehensive strategy for conflict resolution. Implementing the Cognitive Reappraisal Technique to address issues related to collective memories is critical to this approach.

Statues and monuments are permanent forms of commemoration that interpret and reconstruct public memory in colonial settler societies. Representation through memorialisation is attributed to a genealogy of Western collective remembering that reflects the values, narratives, and experiences of the dominant settler population. Yet, collective remembering and memory can change. This article reports on Indigenous collective remembering practices that were observed in a local government intervention in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Boulcott Memorial Research Project sought iwi Māori (Indigenous Māori tribes) perspectives of the battle of Boulcott’s Farm to change a one-sided colonial memorial that was erected to honour British militia who died in the conflict. Iwi kaipūrākau (representatives) from Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Rangatahi, Ngāti Hāua, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira relayed their perspective of the battle through wānanga (a Māori oral tradition). In wānanga, kaipūrākau were perceived to remember relationally, outside colonial time, and through contemporary concerns and political interests, to advance tribal autonomy and self-determination. In this paper, I show how collective remembering in wānanga offers an anti-colonial ethic and intervention for building commemorative landscapes that can redirect public remembrance beyond the limitations of settler colonial memory and towards perspectives that are in tune with Indigenous peoples’ lived realities.

The interconnection between the objectives of territorial development and those of the agro-ecological transition highlights the value of past knowledge in the sustainable management of resources and agro-ecological systems. However, the lack of data creates difficulties for retrospection in rural areas. This paper contributes to the search for such knowledge from the past by developing an interactive methodology capable of combining heterogeneous information sources with the activation of local collective memory. Its effectiveness is based on ensuring the interoperability of information and communication in an environment simultaneously shaped by geoinformatics and 3D geovisualisations. This virtual environment fostered participation and interactivity, supported by representations of the paleo-landscape (Ottoman period). Furthermore, synergies were achieved between information sources, which were integrated into local spatial systems. The application example involved identifying a rice field that existed between the 15th and 19th centuries in Thessaly, Greece. It is an interesting case because the research results indicated that the location and organisation of the crop, combined with the spatio-temporal coordination required, ensured the sustainable use of natural resources. The interplay between information and communication facilitated community participation and the activation of its collective memory as an information source that enriched the search itself and local intelligence.

This research is concerned with individuals’ symbolic interactions with the Charging Bull statue. We chose this statue because it is an extremely popular tourist attraction and the most visited nonhuman statue in New York City. However, there is no research devoted to understanding how visitors interact with the statue. To fill this gap in the literature, we examine people’s interactions as a unique way of communicating with the Charging Bull statue in New York City through a photo analysis approach. Using the general framework of symbolic interactionism, the paper investigates poses, gestures, and more generally interactions of individuals near or with the statue to gain insights into the impact of the Charging Bull beyond a mere visual representation. The findings reveal various forms of interaction, including souvenir photography, active participation, unexpected interactions, and public-made symbolism. This study of these interactions contributes to the literature on collective memory and the study of statues. Additionally, this research highlights the inventiveness of the dynamic relationship between individuals and statues as symbols in the urban environment.

If working through the past is going to heal a nation, it has to come from within. This paper explores two senses of historical responsibility: the responsibility we bear for healing the wounds of the past or working-off-the-past, and the responsibility we may have in fulfilling the promises of the defining moments of the past (redeeming or cashing in on the past). By utilizing these two conceptual tools, the paper carves out a normative space Adwa ought to occupy in a just and ethical revitalisation of our collective memories. It argues that the process of coming to terms with divisive historical legacies must pass „the Adwa test‟ that it ought to be comprehensively liberating, universalizable, and thus has the ability to translate „the past as future.‟ The victory in Adwa passes on the responsibility to birth our future in the image of its Volksgeist or spirit of the people (in the Hegelian sense indicating dialectical unfolding of the self, and not in the Fichtean sense where the past is defined in puritan terms) and by cultivating a national character commensurate with it. This paper posits that engagement with the positive experience of freedom from colonialism and the attendant sense of individual and collective autonomy that Adwa provides is one part of the equation for what Adorno calls “reconciliation” of the subject with object (history). The other part is a genuine recognition of the collective memory that past harm brought forth in the present, which we often reject as inherently unlike us. While Adwa offers the ground we stand on, embracing historical contradictions will serve as a condition for genuine reconciliation. The responsibility to come to terms with, atone for, and rectify the legacies of our history must be underpinned by an equal responsibility to fulfil Adwa‟s promises.

This paper studies what it was like to grow up in the German-speaking South Tyrol between 1922 and 1939, a time period that was significantly characterized by Italian Fascism. More specifically, one key focus was the analysis of how childhood models, ideals and concepts were recontextualized by the stakeholders of all relevant socialization authorities as well as state and Fascist institutions. A second focus was on the actions of the children themselves in dealing with the contrasting expectations and confrontations directed at them. The paper delivers an analysis of individually remembered and experienced aspects of childhood on the basis of the sources available.

The First World War has left deep traces on the lives of ordinary people. Therefore, it is no wonder that the theme of war was present in various types of human creativity, among other things in theatre. Considering the complexity of the Yugoslav space, the paper aims to point out the image of war on domestic theatre stages. Using archival material and published sources, we gain insight into different interpretations and representations of war in theatre during the seventy years of the common state. In this way, the theatre contributed to shaping public opinion on the events of 1914–1918.

Contemporary scholarship overwhelmingly suggests that political elites cannot be trusted to initiate and lead reconciliation processes, for various reasons such as the manipulation of collective memory for political expediency. Accordingly, this paper posits, Kenya’s now-defunct Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), the product of a 2018 political truce (“handshake”) between arch-rivals—former President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga—ought to be critically reassessed. Although it was presented to Kenyans as an instrument for building lasting unity, giving the impression that it would yield justice for, among others, victims of electoral violence, it may also have been motivated by succession politics. This study, therefore, employs a qualitative design anchored in focus group methodology to seek answers to the following two broad questions: 1) Did Kenyans at the grassroots consider the handshake and the resultant BBI appropriate justice mechanisms vis-à-vis the post-election violence of 2017? 2) How did the handshake and BBI affect collective memory of the 2017 post-election violence? It finds, partly, that the grassroots understanding of what constitutes justice for victims of post-election violence in Kenya largely differs from and even transcends the content of the BBI report; it is multifaceted and features, amongst other aspects, the need to first acknowledge the victims of Kenya’s post-election violence and a grassroots-oriented approach to conciliation, involving apologies and forgiveness deriving from face-to-face engagements between citizens and the police. Also, Kenyans remember the 2017 election cycle, and the atrocities thereof, vividly. The findings suggest that future conciliatory measures in the Kenyan scenario would have greater impact if they combined elements of transitional and rectificatory justice to ensure the restoration of the dignity of victims of atrocities.

The subject of interest of the paper is Historia bez Cenzury (“History Uncensored”), a popular series of historical educational videos. The series can be recognised as an effective tool for the shaping of the collective memory of the young generation thanks to the intriguing content of the programme, as well as its linguistic and visual attractiveness. The analysis has revealed two basic communication strategies that serve this purpose; the first is somatisation, that is, concentration on the corporeality of historical figures, and the other is the modernisation of form – which has been used in the series on the linguistic (lexis and phraseology) and the cultural (allusions to the modern world) levels. The aim of the paper is the presentation of linguistic and (to a lesser degree) non-linguistic exponents of these mechanisms.

This paper discusses the concepts of conflict and border in relation to place and identity reflecting on narratives and meanings of dividing urban and civil borders. It takes the divided Greek and Turkish society living in Nicosia as a case study. The significance of the wall, as an explicit expression of division, is discussed but also overturned by looking at its closure and its permeability when Nicosia’s sealed borders opened again for everyday crossing. The inquiry speculates an alternative path informed by Glissant’s concept of Opacity, Agamben and Nancy’s non-essentialist approaches non-community to look at entangled deep-rooted ethnic divisions and fragments of shared cultures. To inform urban epistemology, two bottom-up examples are analysed using De Certeau’s concepts of everyday life: Home for Cooperation, which is a neutral space in the buffer zone for unified collectively and Occupy Buffer-zone Movement, which has occupied a non-place and transformed it into a public square through grassroots activism. The paper highlights that in order to draw a feasible future of Cyprus, an anti-essentialist acceptance of the multiple and eclectic origins of the context is needed. In this sense, the tangible and intangible meaning of division requires a shift of meaning, from delimitation, classification, separation to a porous element of balance and calibration. The top-down urban models and concept of inclusiveness have been shaken by the temporal civic grassroots communities, and this demonstrates that collective participation fosters the reappropriation of public space, overturning the perception and the experience of the border of differences. This contributes to theorizing a critical and reflective, rather than idealistic, practice of participation in urban design.

Dealing with interpretation, we first revisited the theoretical models of hermeneutics (hermeneutical cycle), semantics (triangle) and information sciences, as well as the model of heritage interpretation pedagogy. To design a more appropriate heritage interpretation model that meets the requirements of full public participation, we defined the key concepts (on top of heritage interpretation itself): memory, knowledge and values. The arguments for such a choice have been expounded from three viewpoints: semantics (defining their current meaning and etymology of terms), neuroscience and heritage studies (in Slovenia and some other countries, we use the term ‘heritology’ – denoting the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies). The paper concludes by outlining the heritage interpretation model, graphically presented in two diagrams: the structural one in the form of a three-circle Venn diagram with the corresponding matrix and the process diagram following the adaptive management pattern. The discussion presents critical issues of the model and points out some advantages of its practical implementation.

The presented paper deals with the national minority of Transylvanian Saxons in Romania. It describes the historical story of the community and the importance of festivities. Based on long-term field research, it describes and analyzes the problems associated with reconstructing the ethnic identity of the community. Primarily, it focuses on the issue of social conditionality of memory. The paper presents the individual responders' recollections of the fundamental events in the community's history in the second half of the 20th century. Methodologically, it follows the tradition of ethnographic research, building on theoretical concepts of ethnicity (T. H. Eriksen, B. Anderson, A. D. Smith) and memory studies (M. Halbwachs, J. Assmann, P. Nora).

This paper makes an effort to specify the notion of cultureme which has circulated in the humanities for a quite long time. Since the introduction of this notion some 30 years ago, researchers have been consistently conducted studies on culturemes, however with the possible side effect of overloading and inflating the category in question. Despite that, it is worth a try to capitalise on the heterogenity of the cultureme notion and to enhance the handling of this seemingly omnipotent category through conceptual fusions or synergies. Such an attempt will be made here, and it will be founded on linking culture to collective memory and identity. In this trialistic attraction field there will be made a kind of conceptual deep drilling, taking its point of departure in the notion of identity. One of the most important identity poles for EU citizens can be seen in national identity (Fukuyama 2019: 182), therefore it will serve as a continuation point for the specification of the cultureme notion, which will certainly not get around an empirically hedged operationalisation of the targeted reference point (i.e. national identity). It is for instance possible in this context to base the required operationalisation on the sociologically established category of national pride, which is as well referred back in the article. As a final outcome a realignment of the cultureme notion is offered for discussion.

The paper deals with the issue of post-war abandoned communities and settlements in the Czech borderland and the current form and function of these places in society and in the countryside. The paper will first describe the development of abandonment and demolition of the border settlements in its historical and social context. Most of the extinct settlements in the Czech borderland described were levelled in the first years after World War II or during the reign of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Most of these settlements were destroyed because of the displacement of Germans from the Czech lands, as they remained permanently abandoned. Other settlements disappeared due to the establishment of a border zone or military training areas. The study will go on to discuss in more detail the theme of the collective recollection of the extinct border settlements from their former inhabitants, in this case mainly among the displaced Germans from the Czech lands. In the next part of the study, some specific activities to popularize and revive the abandoned settlements that occurred mainly after 1989 and are ongoing to the present day will be documented and critically evaluated directly in specific border regions.

Cultural routes, defined as routes of historical importance that geographically represent the shared and living cultural heritage of different countries, have recently gained attention both as tourist destinations and as social repositories of collective local memories. In this paper we argue that the recent development of digital humanities can open interesting new perspectives for the empirical exploration of these routes as cultural objects. Indeed, the availability of new digital traces generated by human activities and social media combined with tools that facilitate the exploration of such traces allow researchers to create new types of fieldwork online. In this paper, we present a case study focused on the Via Francigena cultural route. We added a geographical component to a graph analysis tool called histograph, making it possible to explore and analyse a corpus of more than 8,000 Instagram pictures. We investigate the potential of the prototype to uncover socio-spatial relations related to the itinerary and to hypothesise about the collective memories that the route conveys in this corpus.

This study uses the theory of collective memory in international politics to examine the connection between collective memory and foreign policy to investigate why the Belt and Road Initiative has witnessed slow progress in Thailand. Qualitative data were gathered from various sources, including books, newspapers, journals, policy documents, and textbooks. The study concludes that cooperation between states is essential for achieving shared objectives but is contingent upon establishing mutual trust. Collective memories that one country maintains concerning another country can influence mutual understanding and trust, becoming ingrained even if the situation responsible for the memories changes or no longer exists. In the case of Thailand and China, the Thai government’s push for the high-speed rail project faced criticism and concerns due to the public’s deep-seated fears and distrust of China, the result of historical events and past experiences. This paper’s findings highlight the state’s role in creating collective memory and otherness, recognizing that external variables such as major power activities play a significant role.

In this study, how landscape architecture students associate the traces of the past of a given site with their conceptual approaches and spatial components in the design process is discussed. Karagöz Square, located in the city center of Trabzon, has undergone dramatic and mostly negative changes from the past to the present in functional, visual and semantic terms. the area which is under urban transformation process in order to revitalize, to make it a part of urban life and in this context to regain its old functions has been given to students as the subject of design within the scope of Environmental Design Project IV course. Within the scope of this paper, how students investigated the past of design area and physical and social dimensions of collective memory, how they reflected on their conceptual approaches and main design decisions, and then through which spatial components and usage types these decisions were reflected on projects are determined and explained. In a design group of 9 students, 5 designs, conceptual approaches of which were based on the history of the city and the design area and traces left in collective memory were discussed in detail. As a result of the content analysis of the presentations and reports of the students it was determined that some students were inspired by the past functional (such as socialization) and semantic dimensions of the area (such as entertainment and play) or the physical components of the area (such as olive trees, amusement park-entertainment equipment). The other students were inspired by the historical features of the city of Trabzon (the empires of the past) or the traces of cultural features in the society such as Trabzonspor and determined their design approaches based on these. In line with these, spatial components and usage types-activities in the final products are detailed in this study. How collective memory can be a tool for determining conceptual approaches in landscape design is also discussed.

The paper explores the relation between collective memory and social theory, trying in particular to show the key role that the notion of collective memory plays in understanding the dynamics of the social process (structuration, genesis of social structure). It does it by means of a series of reinterpretations of classical authors. Investigating the phenomenon of forgetting as covering up the traces of social change (M. Halbwachs), problematized in the contemporary context (P. Bourdieu), leads us to unraveling the problematic character of social change as such in a vain effort of annulment of memory (A. Touraine), and finally to rediscovering of social memory at a deeper level, as a profound structure of social processes. This discovery points to the necessity of introducing a new, yet undeveloped method of studying the social unconscious (A. Giddens, J. Assmann, and in particular J. Alexander). Jeffrey Alexander overtly postulates such a development, identifying his major project of cultural sociology with a kind of social psychoanalysis. The paper ends with a question – where such a postulate leads us to? Perhaps we need a new kind of art of benevolent interpretation that brings along with new understanding also some kind of soothing the pain of misery, deeply inscribed in social existence.

For a long time, the field of marine geography has been located at the edge of the discipline, strengthening the terrestrial bias of human geography. Fishermen, one of the few action actors in the ocean, have natural mobility characteristics. Existing research on fishermen pays more attention to the temporal and spatial regulations and distribution of their mobility than the social and cultural connotations generated in the process of their flow. From the perspective of mobility and collective memory, a typical fishing village in the east of Hainan Province was selected as a case study, and through participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and text analysis, the construction of the local memory of fishermen in the process of mobility was comprehensively understood. In this study, the following points were found: First, according to research on the new paradigm of mobility, the world interact with each other through the flow of nodes and the space of flows, with emphasis on liquidity from the state of "flow, berthing, settled" in three different space-time conceptions to describe the world, thus inferring the Hainan fishermen's marine mobility, at least in the scope of time and space, material basis, and the paths of nodes. Second, collective memory is an important way for fishermen to interact with each other and construct emotions in the flow process. The core of this is fishing and hunting culture and the cross-border network. Three points should be made clear when discussing the collective memory of fishermen from the perspective of mobility: First, collective memory is essentially based on the "present" and a construction of the "past", and a change of subject will greatly affect the continuity and inheritance of memory. Second, memory is formed by personal emotions and objective environments. For fishermen, collective memory unfolds in a specific place, shifting with different spatial scales through a landscape of physical and symbolic memories. Third, geographical and social mobility complement each other, exacerbating the differences of fishermen and leading to the fragmentation or failing of collective memory. This paper makes two contributions to this concept: (1) Taking the phenomenon of the flow of fishermen as an example, the ocean is examined from the perspective of the ocean, emphasizing the importance of the connection between the ocean and land. It also goes beyond the land's perspective of the sea, indicating that the ocean is an equally important substrate for the integration of socio-cultural, political, and economic transformation processes and should not be regarded as a negative space of land. Instead, it is the center of the process of knowledge production, concrete experience, and understanding the transcendence of the present. (2) It responds to the attention of the new mobility paradigm to special space and compensates for the missing dimension of interaction between the marine environment and human activity.

This paper analyses the relationship between sporting heroes and collective memory, through a specific case study: the Gino Bartali biography. Usually, this type of narrative is referring to sporting heroes and their extraordinary performances and successes; instead, in this case, we talk about Bartali not only as a sporting hero but also in the context of relevant national historic events, defining more clearly the relationship between memory and history. In this paper, we analyse the post memory studies (Hirsch, 2012) wherever these scholars use the human and sporting champion biographies to pass down human and political value-based messages to younger generations. In other words, the social memory (Halbwachs) will be used to build a generational imaginary.

The commemorative practices relating to the anniversary dates of the Tatar poet Gabdulla Tuqay (from 1918 to 2016) have been discussed. The commemorative meetings and celebrations, as well as building of monuments to G. Tuqay and a tombstone on his grave, and opening of museums have been considered as commemorative practices. The development of the image of the Tatar national poet during the 20th – 21st centuries has been also analyzed. The paper touches upon the collective memory and national identity of the Tatars. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the problem of anniversary commemoration has been little investigated, and there are not enough works on the cultural and historical memory of the Tatars. The image and works of G. Tuqay have been thoroughly studied by philologists, literary critics, historians, but the problem of anniversary commemoration of the poet has been raised for the first time. The paper is based on the methodology of studies on commemoration. The terms were introduced by Jan and Aleida Assmann and Pierre Nora. Since the phenomenon of commemoration represents an interdisciplinary field, various methods have been used to analyze the texts and visual sources. The paper cites a number of examples proving that the period of transition from the communicative to cultural memory becomes shorter under the conditions of the cultural change and events of the 1920s–1930s that took place in the Soviet Union. This conclusion is proved by the following facts: firstly, state holidays were arranged in honor of G. Tuqay starting from 1938; secondly, the celebrations of G. Tuqay's birth (distant event) dominated over the commemoration of death (close event) since 1946; thirdly, the ritualization of commemorative practices and the mythologization of G. Tuqay's image as a characteristic feature of the cultural memory can be noted; fourthly, the bearers of memories (communicative memory) turned out to be replaced by the experts keeping them (philologists, historians, literary scholars). Based on the results of the study, the conclusion has been made that we can trace coolness/consolidation of the collective memory through anniversary and monumental commemoration. The myth of G. Tuqay as of a national poet has occurred and established along with the commemorative practices, thereby determining the vision of the past and group consolidation. The results obtained are important for further studies of anniversary commemoration.

The First World War brought radical changes to the political map of Europe and took more than 15 million lives on both warring sides. This conflict of unprecedented proportions has left deep traces on the lives of people who found themselves in a whirlwind of war. Therefore, it is no wonder that the theme of war was present in various types of human creativity - through literature (especially autobiographical genres), art, but also popular culture, where movies rightly took centre stage. Even during the period 1914-1918, the film became the main weapon of propaganda. Through this instrument, the message was able to reach quickly a large number of people, regardless of their social status and level of education. After 1918, the film served as a popular medium through which the memory of war events was preserved. The first movies exuded the anti-war spirit at the moment when post-war Europe was facing long-term economic consequences that had surfaced. Pacifist messages could be seen in different film productions, which to a large extent looked up to Hollywood, the most significant film industry in the world. The same was in the case of smaller allied countries such as Greece and Serbia, which both paved a different path of development due to the complexity of historical processes conducted in these Balkan countries. This paper aims to point out these different developments and shed light on lesser-known facts about Yugoslav and Greek WWI cinematography.

Abstract This paper studies the news coverage of the 2014 Mt. Ontake eruption disaster from 2015 to 2019, and the public response to the fifth anniversary coverage. Information on the issues regarding the risk of low-frequency disaster events such as volcanic eruption is brought into the public largely through the media. Unless there is a volcano nearby, there are few opportunities to discuss volcanic disaster prevention, and enhance volcanic risk perception. Therefore, the media agendas on volcanic risk are an indicator of what people know about volcanic disaster preparedness. This study quantitatively analyzed the 2014 Mt. Ontake eruption reports of national, regional, and local newspapers to reveal their topic distributions. In addition, the anniversary gained intense public attention due to the large amount of media coverage. It was a significant opportunity for society to discuss volcanic risk. By observing people’s online responses to the anniversary coverage, a trend could be identified. We found a significant difference in media attention among the three newspaper types. The local newspaper covered four topics relating to volcanic risk in a well-balanced way, but the national and regional newspapers paid greater attention to one or two topics. Many online comments presented the view that a mountaineering should be done at individuals’ own risk, and volcano shelters would be ineffective for averting volcanic disasters. The anniversary coverage unintentionally contributes to stigmatizing or scapegoating a certain group, rather than promoting risk communication in the public sphere on the Web. With the onset of the information and communication information technology era, an online dialogue regarding disaster awareness and prevention is important. A volcano disaster risk communication strategy on the Web should be developed.

Traditional life in Indonesia is significantly related to spoken culture from the older generation to the young age. This condition unconsciously shows a risk of void space when there is a disconnected generation. Only a small number of written documentation and drawings exist for Vernacular Architecture in Indonesia or Architecture Nusantara. Tazo is one of several villages in Riung district, Flores island, in Nusa Tenggara Timur province, Indonesia. The current condition of the traditional house of Tazo is extinct, and there are no physical traces anymore. In this paper, we will show the excavation of the traditional house of the Tazo with the method of searching for data through oral interviews with existing traditional elders who have experienced living in their traditional house before. Step by step, the shape of this traditional house is illustrated architecturally and can be recognized again by the memory of the traditional elders of Kampung Tazo.

In this paper, we look at the way through which the conception of the relationship between the three notions of affects, narratives and politics has been conceptualized all along the history of idea identifying three main moments. (1) The Renan’s moment, in which narratives are identified as being a part of the core notion of what makes a nation through the affects of belongings that they are prone to generate. (2) The Halbwachs’ moment at which a distinction was made between history and memory. (3) And finally, the Ricœur’s moment, which tries to define a position that would respect but also pretend to go beyond the distinction previously made by Halbwachs. A common feature of these three moments is then identified pointing to the nexus between narratives, emotions, and politics.

The paper focuses on the potential of urban communicative space to transmit basic ideology paradigm and values of the current political regime in the course of interaction with city residents. Commemoration is regarded as one the key entities involved in transmitting ideologically charged information. The phenomenon of commemoration is understood as a collection of public practices aimed at creating government-approved values and behavioral models via regular reproduction schemes implemented on the basis of perception of past recognized in the society. The goal of the research was to examine verbalization of commemoration in urban space with regard to the historical-political context. The empirical basis of the study includes a corpus of commemorative texts collected by the authors. Commemorative texts were extracted from the open data portal developed and supported by the Government of Moscow. The total number of records registered in the corpus amounted to over 1700. The language data were processed via the AntConc software that allows obtaining information about word frequency and the contexts in which the relevant word occurs. In the next step conclusions about topical and conceptual dominants of commemorative texts were made. Further investigation allowed describing the structural scheme of commemorative texts, determining its zero variability in different temporal periods, identifying an obligatory structural element that displayed sensitiveness to political climate and specifying key discourse strategies correlated with the ideological paradigm of the current political regime.

In the article the author attempts to outline theoretical and methodological framework used in analyzing the phenomenon of specific history politics in cities divided by state borders – places where sometimes radically different history narrations meet or even clash. The article is composed of three parts. The first one specifies the concept of history politics in nationwide dimension (“history politics”). The second part analyzes history politics in local dimension (“local politics of memory”). With reference to these two concepts – levels of history politics and politics of memory – the author indicates: goals, subjects, methods and tools of history politics/politics of memory. The final section of the paper aims at capturing the specificity of history politics in cities divided by state borders and indicating models of relations between different kinds of politics of memory in cities divided by state borders.

The objective of this paper is to investigate, analyze and evaluate the cultural policy in Macedonia embodied in the government's Skopje 2014 project, particularly in the Museum of Macedonian struggle for sovereignty and independence, the Museum of VMRO and the Museum of the Victims of the Communist Regime= by putting the emphasis on the post-communist politics of memory, which is used for reshaping the post-communist national identity.

The author aims to discuss three topics using the memory research method. The first part discusses construction of the imagined community and collective memory of 19th century Lithuanian intellectuals in a country where education in the national language, and the printing of books and papers, were banned. The second part of the article presents the impact of the Great War and the struggle for independence on collective memory as revealed in memoirs written in the 1914–1940 period by fighters on the front lines, refugees, intellectuals, and people in the occupied country. The third part discusses the extinction of the Great War and the battle for independence from collective memory as a natural and specially constructed phenomenon, caused by the Soviet regime.

This article explores a particular marketing trend operating online during the 2010s and consisting of promoting clubbing parties using communist-style posters. The first part of the paper is dedicated to the theoretical framework and approaches the study of the posters also as an alternative memory practice that digitally marked the online landscape of leisure promotion, participating in the making of a nostalgia economy. A socio-semiotic analysis is used for a body of 118 communist themed clubbing advertisements posted online between 2009 and 2019, where content analysis provided data that narrowed the duration of the aforementioned marketing practices to a time span of six years. Content analysis also yielded an overview of the most used visual patterns, while the examination of the production techniques showed that most of the posters displayed extensive digital alteration of the ideological insignia, consistent with the conversion of political icons into kitsch practiced elsewhere in Eastern Europe. These findings are put in perspective within the context of a generational change, while the posters could be the basis for future research under the framework of collective and cultural memory.

The remembrance of war and commemoration practices shape the collective memories of society and, as such, war has been one of the most productive topics in memory studies. Commemorating past wars is one of the ways of constructing a commonly shared memory that would enhance group cohesion and shape collective identity. This paper will provide three examples of sites of memory in reference to the Malvinas/Falklands War, one from each side of the dispute— United Kingdom, Argentina and a third example from the actual territory of the Falkland Islands to illustrate how war memorials are an expression of patriotism, built to frame the deaths in terms of a national narrative of glorious sacrifice for cause and nation. Therefore, war commemoration recalls past experiences of suffering, but at the same time, of resistance.

Interpreting and staging the past is an integral part of politics in its different forms. Selected historical events that are attached greater importance have often been contested politically. In the last two decades or so, clashes over the past have escalated in most consolidated democracies and have become more closely linked with other dimensions of political conflict. In the already consolidated Czech democracy, disputes have reopened over both the Communist regime and a much older past, with history fully entering the political agenda. These conflicts have been centred on both the historical subjects and fundamental points of collective memory, and on locations related to that memory and history. In a specific time and space, those places represent a certain tale, a certain interpretation of historical events, and at the same time allow for the development of other tales, often updated and in some cases politically contested. The forms and nature of the physical places of collective memory may vary. Firstly, these may be places “where bodies lie or have lain” – mass graves, destroyed communities or other places of collective suffering. This paper tackles this issue and analyses the narratives constructed by leading Czech politicians of the WWII Roma concentration camp in Lety. It presents the main arguments of the competing narratives and their changes throughout the post-Communist period.

On 17th August 2017, there was a terrorist attack on La Rambla in Barcelona. From that day on, citizens would sporadically generate displays of sympathy by leaving flowers, messages, candles or other objects along the length of the avenue. Barcelona City Hall created a website including a digital book of condolences. It also placed a paper book of condolences in its Salón de Ciento for anyone who wished to express sympathy in person. Days after the attempt, a team of people working for City Hall put on a display in La Rambla. Its aim was to gather the displays of sympathy, expressions of mourning and citizen solidarity, processing them and making them accessible via various digital platforms in order to highlight their significance.

On 17th August 2017, there was a terrorist attack on La Rambla in Barcelona. From that day on, citizens would sporadically generate displays of sympathy by leaving flowers, messages, candles or other objects along the length of the avenue. Barcelona City Hall created a website including a digital book of condolences. It also placed a paper book of condolences in its Salón de Ciento for anyone who wished to express sympathy in person. Days after the attempt, a team of people working for City Hall put on a display in La Rambla. Its aim was to gather the displays of sympathy, expressions of mourning and citizen solidarity, processing them and making them accessible via various digital platforms in order to highlight their significance.

Referring to the postulates of several theoreticians in the field of memory studies, predominantly those of Maurice Halbwachs and Aleida Assmann, this paper explores the distinction between individual and collective memory, with the aim of shedding light on the complex relationship of the two contrasting yet mutually complementing mnemonic aspects in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Interestingly enough, in his latest novel Ishiguro decided to approach memory from the perspective of its inevitable counterpart, i.e. forgetfulness. The objective of this paper is to highlight that forgetfulness, for all its seeming mental salubrity, does not have the same healing effect at the individual and collective level.