Introduction What is a false memory? It is a recollection that seems real in one’s mind but is fabricated in part or in whole. Most people have examples of false memories, for example a child may believe they had been grounded for the first time for not washing the dishes at the age of 12, but is later told by their mother it was due to rudeness, and that they had been grounded before. Most false memories are not malicious or even intentionally hurtful. They are shifts or reconstructions of memory that do not align with the true events. However, some false
Memory is never static, but rather a construction embedded in changing personal, social, and temporal settings. Memory is never neutral, and reflects the interaction between personal and dominant collective memories. When a political culture changes, recollections and collective memories become contested, and new ones become dominant and come to the fore. This is clearly visible when we look at the “new” histories in the post-communist world, where the surge of commemorative work that highlights the World War II-era victimization of citizens by communist forces
Memory is at the center of a diverse array of political conflicts, moral disputes and power dynamics.
This book illustrates how scholars use different interpretive lenses to study and explain profound conflicts rooted in the past.
Addressing issues of racism, genocide, trauma, war, nationalism, colonial occupation and more, it highlights how our interpretations of contentious memories are indispensable to our understandings of contemporary conflicts and identities.
Featuring an international group of scholars, this book makes important contributions to social memory studies, but also shows how studying memory is vital to our understanding of enduring social problems that span the globe.
Social media platforms hold vast amounts of biographical data about our lives. They repackage our past content as ‘memories’ and deliver them back to us. But how does that change the way we remember?
Drawing on original qualitative research as well as industry documents and reports, this book critically explores the process behind this new form of memory making. In asking how social media are beginning to change the way we remember, it will be essential reading for scholars and students who are interested in understanding the algorithmically defined spaces of our lives.
Acclaimed activist and scholar Gill Hague recounts the inspiring story of the domestic violence movement in the UK and beyond from the 1960s onwards in this captivating book.
Memories, poems and interviews with activists, practitioners and abuse survivors shed new light on a period of immense change, shaped by a generation of feminist pioneers.
From the women’s liberation movement until now, this book showcases the campaigning zeal with which policies, services and awareness-raising on gendered violence in the UK and across the world were built, including for Black and minority women. This fascinating history will inform and inspire new ways forward within the domestic violence movement.
This chapter: explores the development of human memory and considers ideas about how these memory systems develop; explores several different ways of learning and looks at the brain systems that underpin them; considers some of the more questionable ideas about learning and the brain that have become popular in recent years. A key theme in this book has been that brain development is dependent on experience. Of course, nowhere is this more obvious than when we consider learning and memory. In Chapter 2 we distinguished between experience
The past, the present, and the future are different tonalities of temporality, which are best understood in a processual way. While memory studies have often approached the relation between the past and the present, the future still seems an uncharted territory, despite substantial contributions that investigate the issue of the “memory of the future” ( Gutman et al, 2010 ). I connect the sociological reflection on memory and the past, the semiotic attention to semantic networks, and some recent literature on anticipation to argue that the future is a real
79 Memory FIVE Memory: self, relationship and society Contents Introduction 79 Cognition, dementia and functional ability 80 Cognitive disability 81 The importance of cognition and relationships 82 Care beyond cognition 87 The evolution of memory loss 88 Key points • People with memory problems work actively to manage their memory loss and to remain engaged in society. • Complex societies such as developed countries place a high value on cognitive ability, and so magnify the disability associated with memory loss. • Environments and interpersonal relationships
491 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 3 • no 3 • 491–94 • © Policy Press 2014 • #FRS Print ISSN 2046 7435 • Online ISSN 2046 7443 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674314X14110460769460 Generational memory and 20th-century lives Sally Alexander, s.alexander@gold.ac.uk Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Ideas about memory as the source of human subjectivity developed throughout European liberal democracies in the first half of the 20th century, stimulated by war trauma and universal suffrage. Two archives of memory – psychoanalytic case histories
PART III Genocide, Memory, and the Historicizing of Trauma
