Ambivalent memories of imperial legacies: Asmara as ‘beautiful' and ‘segregationist' from Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how the capital town of Eritrea, Asmara, is depicted alternately as Italian, Eritrean and Ethiopian thus showing the competing claims of ‘ownership’ that traverses its colonial and postcolonial histories and a multifaceted identity. It focuses specifically on how the Italian architecture of Asmara is depicted both as a sign of modernization and oppression. Literary and oral- sources are analysed to illustrate Asmara as a site of cultural encounter and a historical palimpsest such as the poems Asmara (1958, included in the collection Esat Wey Abeba) by Tsegaye Gebremedihin, and And Nebis (1992, included in the collection Efta 60 Tirekawoch) by Haile Melekot Mewael. The novels Oromay (1984) by Bealu Girma, Ye Burqa Zimita (1992) by Tesfaye Gebreab. These contemporary literary and oral reminiscences of Asmara show how Asmara’s architectural legacies are remembered to express memories of ambivalence between beauty and inhibition; being modern and segregated. Whereby, Asmara gets represented as a model town for other African cities, and a city of colonial decay and segregation, in these contradictory accounts of memories of Asmara, a de-colonial method of engagement seems to emerge.     

My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student public that contain discourses that may fall outside the mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group ‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-deprecating humour, students create an inverse attention economy of competitive one-downmanship, where the goal is to display humorous failure instead of perfect appearance. Our analysis shows that students use humour to express, share, and commiserate over daily struggles, but also that the problems related to work/study balance and mental health, are experienced as a persistent feature of student living. We also analyse limitations of meme-based publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and discursive humour where issues related to gender, race, orientation, class, and ability are sidelined in favour of relatable humour.     

The politics of the Digital Single Market: culture vs. competition vs. copyright

This paper examines the implications for European music culture of the European Union’s (EU) Digital Single Market strategy. It focuses on the regulatory framework being created for the management of copyright policy, and in particular the role played by collective management organisations (CMOs or collecting societies). One of the many new opportunities created by digitalisation has been the music streaming services. These depend on consumers being able to access music wherever they are, but such a system runs counter to the management of rights on a national basis and through collecting organisations which act as monopolies within their own territories. The result has been ‘geo-blocking’. The EU has attempted to resolve this problem in a variety of ways, most recently in a Directive designed to reform the CMOs. In this paper, we document these various efforts, showing them to be motivated by a deep-seated and persisting belief in the capacity of ‘competition’ to resolve problems that, we argue, actually lie elsewhere – in copyright policy itself. The result is that the EU’s intervention fails to address its core concern and threatens the diversity of European music culture by rewarding those who are already commercially successful.     

Unravelling Memories of Family Separation Among Sri Lankan Tamils Resettled in Australia, 1983–2000

Abstract

Using life story interviews with 10 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees resettled in Australia, this article shows how family separation in experiences of civil war and resettlement produce long-lasting and emotional memories of fear and determination. The findings explore how young Tamil people gave meaning to family when they interacted with key individuals and negotiated cultural practices in different spaces. Moreover, intergenerational family narratives emerged as a key practice through which Tamils preserved the family identity. The analysis demonstrates how and when family separation can manifest in personal memories to reveal stories of agency and resilience. A critical engagement of the past can help to better understand concepts of childhood in relation to family and family separation in war affected diaspora communities.     

Violence in the name of god? A framing processes approach to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

Since summer 2014, the insurgent group ‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ (ISIS) has become a major concern for international politics and global security due to its rapid territorial gains, violent operations and the propagation of Salafi-jihadist ideology. This study aims to enhance the academic understanding of ISIS by demystifying the ideological reasoning behind its use of violence. It therefore investigates the link between structural factors that served ISIS’s evolution, its ideological outlook and the significance of this ideology to legitimize violent action. As its theoretical basis, the study employs framing processes within the study of social movements. Methodologically, discursive frame analysis serves to explore the relation of ISIS’s ideology to structural events and experiences to better understand how the group justifies violence. Therefore, the study draws on audio speeches and issues of the magazines Dabiq and Dar al-Islam published by ISIS, which are examined on the rhetoric of othering, collective identity and justifying violence. It is argued that ISIS constructs a collective action frame which creates a social reality that bestows the group with a rationale for action. ISIS’s ideology, based on Islamic symbolism, presents an interpretative lens which assigns meaning to the structural environment of ISIS’s emergence. In this context, violence is justified as a necessity to defend Islam and as an obligation for the true Muslim believer. The discussion concludes that ISIS’s ideology legitimizes the very existence of the group and conceals its mundane struggle for power, territory and wealth through reference to divine authority.     

Does surprise enhance infant memory? Assessing the impact of the encoding context on subsequent object recognition

A discrepancy between what was predicted and what is observed has been linked to increased looking times, changes in brain electrical activity, and increased pupil dilation in infants. These processes associated with heightened attention and readiness to learn might enhance the encoding and memory consolidation of the surprising object, as suggested by both the infant and the adult literature. We therefore investigated whether the presence of surprise during the encoding context enhances subsequent encoding and recognition memory processes for the items that violated infants' expectations. Seventeen-month-olds viewed 20 familiar objects, half of which were labeled correctly, while the other half were mislabeled. Subsequently, infants were presented with a silent recognition memory test where the previously labeled objects appeared along with new images. Pupil dilation was measured, with more dilated pupils indicating (1) surprise during those labeling events where the item was mislabeled and (2) successful retrieval processes during the memory test. Infants responded with more pupil dilation to mislabeling compared to correct labeling. Importantly, despite the presence of a surprise response during mislabeling, infants only differentiated between the previously seen and unseen items at the memory test, offering no evidence that surprise had facilitated the encoding of the mislabeled items.     

It’s about the process,not the result: An fMRI approach to explore the encoding of explicit and implicit price information

This research examines the neurophysiological correlates of consumers’ price memory processes. We focus on the explicit and implicit dimensions of consumers’ price knowledge and use an experimental functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study to assess how the encoding of task-dependent price memory affects the choice process and neural activation. The findings of our study add to the field of consumer neuroscience by demonstrating how neural correlates of explicit and implicit task-dependent price memory can shed light on processes that guide consumer decision-making. Over the course of our experiment we found that consumers did not always make consistent decisions, but that their decisions were influenced by explicit components of price memory. Implicit price memory components seem to have a more supportive role in the decision-making process. In summary, we found that price memory is a dynamic construct that is influenced by unconscious and neurophysiological processes, and we conclude that a neurophysiological perspective can add value for consumer and marketing research.     

Making sense of nuclear war: narratives of voluntary civil defence and the memory of Britain’s Cold War

In interviews with members of Britain’s Civil Defence Services, experiences of Cold War voluntarism are recalled in different ways. Some remembered their desire to help defend their nation and local community. Others remembered making a leisure choice that had little connection to the potential nuclear war the organization was ostensibly preparing for. No one provided a well-developed account of civil defence’s ability to provide a defence against the effects of a nuclear war. Popular memory theorists suggest cultural discourse limits the ability of individuals to narrate stories that do not align with culturally valued frameworks: in this case, dominant understandings of civil defence as at best ridiculous or at worst dangerous were established in the 1980s. This article argues that memories of civil defence voluntarism in the 1950-60s have been shaped by these discourses, but that individuals were able to express the different meanings civil defence had in their lives in ways that provide a more nuanced and holistic picture of the intersections of leisure, service and sociability that made up civil defence. As such, it argues that oral history allows us to understand the various ‘horizons of possibility’ that made up individual experiences of the Cold War.     

Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.     

建立以本土企业为主体的协同创新机制研究

改革开放以来，我国经济发展取得了巨大成就，但也面临一些重大挑战，特别是本土企业加入、依赖跨国公司主导的产业链，在短期内得以迅速发展的同时，也导致本土产业链出现了断裂和碎片化的问题，这对本土企业的创新和发展是不利的。文章研究在我国建立以本土企业为主体的协同创新机制的基本规律和特点，为提高本土企业的创新能力提供借鉴。研究的主要发现是，这是一个复杂和曲折的过程，在这一过程的启动阶段和转折阶段，非经济因素或者至少是长期经济因素而不是短期经济因素具有独特的、非常重要的作用。