Social memories: Steps to a sociology of the past

This article is an attempt to develop a comprehensive framework to examine memory from a sociological perspective with a particular emphasis on the impersonal, conventional, collective, and normative aspects of the process of remembering. After discussing the social context of remembering as well as various traditions andrules of remembrance, the article examines the process ofmnemonic socialization. It then moves on to identify variousmnemonic communities (the family, the workplace, the ethnic group, the nation) as well as various social sites of memory(documents, stories, photograph albums, archaeological ruins, the calendar). Following a discussion of the way in which holidays allow mnemonic synchronization,the article ends by examining the politics of remembrance as manifested in various mnemonic battlesover the social legacy of the past.     

Public space,collective memory and intercultural dialogue in a (UK) city of culture

Using the case study of Derry~Londonderry and its designation as ‘UK City of Culture 2013’, the primary objective of this research paper is to critically analyse the challenges associated with the production of a year-long cultural programme in a culturally and politically divided place. Given that Northern Ireland’s second largest city has been understood in terms of a conflict between ‘two traditions’, Irish/Catholic and British/Protestant, we critically assess the dialogue and policy negotiations with reference to public places as well as representations of collective memory and traditional music during the year. Fieldwork over two years has enabled us to investigate how culture and identity politics are played out in the context of a city undergoing a process of reconciliation. Placing our case study in a strongly comparative context, we argue that cultural concerns are pivotal points of (re-)negotiation in any society transitioning from conflict to ‘peace’ and that this issue, therefore, is of vital concern to academics and policymakers alike internationally.     

Getting in touch with history: The role of historic preservation in shaping collective memories

This paper argues that historic preservation is playing an increasingly important role in shaping collective memories. Historic preservation encompasses the range of strategies by which historic structures are maintained, manipulated, and managed. These strategies include preservation, restoration, conservation and consolidation, reconstitution, adaptive re-use, reconstruction, and replication (Fitch 1982: 46–47). While people are drawn to historic sites in the hopes of an immediate encounter with authentic, physical remains, this encounter is never unmediated. Instead, three social processes can be identified that shape it and the collective memories associated with the site: namely 1) selection, 2) contextualization, and 3) interpretation. Focussing on examples drawn from the field of industrial preservation in Great Britain and the United States, I demonstrate how these processes shape our encounters with history, and how this form of commemoration inevitably involves a political dimension.     

Subcultural Identity Work in Social Movements: Barriers to Collective Identity Changes and Overcoming Them

Over time, social movements must contend with a vast array of forces that can lead to changes in the movement's collective identity. As such changes may impact the alignment of movements and their membership, this study explores how changes are perceived by members and how they are interactively addressed. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered from two Native American social movement organizations, this study specifically asks why some changes suggested by movement members might be pursued and others are not. While movement members felt that there were a number of barriers to changes in their movements, the study revealed that it was the resonance of collective memories – presented during interactions as narrative commemorations – that encouraged the pursuit of suggested changes or the maintenance of a status quo.     

The Afghan War and ‘postmodern’ memory: commemoration and the dead of Helmand1

Since 2006, Britain has been fighting an intense military campaign in Helmand in which over 200 soldiers have been killed. The article examines the way in which twentieth‐century commemorative rituals, which mourned the sacrifice of anonymous individual soldiers for the nation, have been superseded by new lapidary conventions which fundamentally revise the status of the soldier in public imagination. In acts of remembrance today, soldiers are personalized and domesticated, remembered as fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. The article concludes by considering the political implications of this revision of public understanding.     

Perceptions of variation and change in German and Swedish address1

German and Swedish speakers diverge in contemporary address practice. The Swedish T form has become unmarked, with V limited to very specific situations. Apart from some specific T or V contexts, German now has coexistent systems, one with T, the other with V as the unmarked form, with different speakers or networks preferring one or the other. In an ongoing project, focus groups and participant observation in Austria, (eastern and western) Germany and Sweden and with Swedish speakers in Finland have identified factors and contexts determining degree of social distance and hence address choice. First name use is more marked than T use in Swedish but the two are closely linked in German. National variation is more substantial in Swedish than in German. In both languages there is some reversal of liberalization and distaste for imposition of the address form.     

Black monument matters: Place-based commemoration and abolitionist memory work

Discrete monuments remain in the domain of the symbolic, land as mnemonic shifts to a more materialist commemorative praxis. This paper proposes a turn toward land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place-making. Reviewing the scholarship on memoryscapes, I show that the critical insights of Black ecologies and geographies scholarship has moved further than traditional scholarship and offers multiple openings for new monuments and commemorative practices in honor of Black life. Black socio-ecologies scholarship centralizes the place-based epistemologies, spatial histories, and experiences of Black communities and clarifies the form and function of land or plots as mnemonics of the Black freedom struggle, place-making practices, and spatial epistemologies. Black plots are, therefore, ideal for orienting a new mode of Black commemoration. While much of the paper centers monuments to Black people, if Black commemoration is foregrounded in abolitionists thinking and practices, such memorialization must grapple with the histories of Indigenous dispossession and settler-colonialism. The paper concludes with a consideration of what the argument for land as mnemonic of Black freedom struggle and place-making might mean for future avenues of research.     

Digitization and materiality: researching community memory practice today

Among the most deep‐seated anxieties of the Internet age is the fear of technologically produced forgetting. Technology critics and sociologists of memory alike argue that daily exposure to overwhelming flows of information is undermining our ability to connect and synthesize past and present. Acknowledging the salience of these concerns our approach seeks to understand the contemporary conditions of collective memory practice in relation to processes of digitization. We do so by developing an analysis of how digital technologies (image and audio capture, storage, editing, reproduction, distribution and exhibition) have become embedded in wider memory practices of storytelling and commemoration in a community setting: the Salford Lads Club, an organization in the north of England in continuous operation since 1903. The diverse memory practices prompted by the 100th anniversary of the Club's annual camp provide a context in which to explore the transformations of access, interpretation and use, that occur when the archives of civic organizations are digitized. Returning to Halbwachs' (1992) seminal insight that all collective memory requires a material social framework, we argue, contrary to prevailing characterizations of digitization, that under specific conditions, digital resources facilitate new forms of materialization that contribute to sustaining a civic organization's intergenerational continuity.     

Breaking free from siloes: intersectionality as a collective action frame to address toxic exposures and reproductive health

ABSTRACT

There has been increasing interest in collaborative approaches between the environmental justice (EJ) and reproductive justice (RJ) movements to address the higher burden of toxic exposures and associated reproductive health outcomes in vulnerable communities. This study examined the collective action frames (CAFs) of advocates at the EJ/RJ nexus. CAFs highlight how advocates identify problems and solutions, and motivate action. The use of intersectionality was identified as a main CAF used in three key ways: breaking free from identity-based, issue-based, and movement-based siloes. First, interviewees described breaking free from identity-based siloes by identifying risks of toxic exposures that result from intersecting social locations (e.g. gender, race/ethnicity, income, immigration status) and by equally prioritizing multiple aspects of their identities as they engage in advocacy. Second, they described breaking free from issue-based siloes by developing multi-issue agendas that address a complex web of interrelated problems impacting health. Third, they described breaking free from movement-based siloes by developing cross-movement collaborations to address issues of mutual concern. Among multiple reasons given for cross-movement collaborations, advocates perceived them as valuable in order to disrupt social, political, and economic power imbalances that shape environmental reproductive health inequities, as well as other health and social inequities. Based on these findings, we suggest that intersectionality is a master frame, and thus may be useful to advocates in other social movements addressing intersectional issues. Understanding an intersectionality frame can help to inform advocacy approaches to promote health and health equity, particularly those focused on policies and structural drivers of health.     

Mobilizing Memory: Bolivia's Enduring Social Movements

In Bolivia, the most indigenous of South American countries, powerful social movements have drawn on collective memory to build effective coalitions across significant differences in ethnic identity and awareness, class consciousness, generations and regions. We contend that this deployment of memory to strengthen protest identities is reinforced by pervasive indigenous cultural practices. Deeply rooted in oral storytelling, perceptions of time, place and a reverence for ancestors, collective memories help bring the past into the present, and create responsibilities to those who came before. The result is a mutually constituting relationship between memory and activism, where an instrumental construction of collective memories serves to provide shared meanings to divergent movements. We suggest that scholars of social movements could deepen their analysis by interrogating rather than normalizing the cultural backdrops that movements operate within.     

Creating the collective: social media,the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity.     

Collective Memory and Social Restructuring in the Case of Traditional Inuit Shamanism

This article explores the sociological processes of collective memory manipulation in unsettled times by analyzing a case study of the Church's displacement of traditional shamanism in Arviat, Nunavut. Collective memory studies, which examine regime transitions, focus on tracing the path of collective memory, rather than examining the mechanisms used to gain and keep control over collective memory. I argue that three elements are necessary for this kind of control: (1) shifting the “historical horizon” to temporally locate the competing institution firmly in the past within community memory, (2) manipulating the reputation of the competing, soon‐to‐be‐previous institution, and (3) establishing a new moral framework. I center my argument primarily on the accomplishment of these elements using narrative and rhetoric, which emerged through inductive analysis.     

Repression and popular collective action: Evidence from the West Bank

This article examines the connection between state repression and the dynamics of popular collective action in the Palestinian West Bank from 1976 to 1985. Unlike traditional social movement research that focuses on structural causes, the analysis is confined here to the interaction between the state and its challengers. How shifts in the form and level of repression affected the rate of collective action is the main question addressed. A dynamic, continuous-time model, based on systematic evidence, is used to answer this question. Assuming a Weibull parameterization, the model allows for time dependence of the hazard rate. With a few exceptions, repression was found to increase the rate of collective action. This finding contradicts certain hypotheses advanced by movement researchers regarding the efficacy of state coercion and control, and suggests that repression may appropriately be considered a powerful mobilizational force in similar contexts.An earlier version was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Cincinnati, Ohio, August 1991.     

Resolving complex community problems: Applying collective leadership and Kotter's change model to wicked problems within social system networks

How does collective leadership within social networks resolve chronic and complex problems common to communities? Unfortunately, sometimes it does not, but when it does, the outcome may be truly extraordinary. We use a case study approach to explain how one Midwest community within the USA applied collective leadership within a community network to reduce teen births. It took ten years of what many identified as provocative media campaigns and comprehensive sex education programs to reduce teen births by 65%, significantly exceeding the stated goal. Using Kotter's change model as a backdrop, powerful strategies and provocative creativity reveal courageous leadership within a social network of diverse people and organizations focused on improving the social well being of their community.     

Crisis collective memory making on social media: A case study of three Chinese crises on Weibo

Social media users collectively (re)construct narratives to create memories surrounding past crises. In this study, we connect the concept of collective memory with a public-oriented approach to crisis communication to examine how crisis response frames and collective memory narratives were displayed by different social actors (government, organizations, and publics) on one of China’s social media platforms, Weibo. Findings from a content analysis of 9238 unique posts on three national crises (the 2010 Yushu Earthquake, the 2015 Tianjin Explosions, and the 2018 Vaccine Scandal) reveal that Chinese publics tended to adopt social issue and blaming frames, while the government and organizations were more prone to using informing and corrective action frames. When recalling and reconstructing crisis memories, Chinese publics used more power and contestation narrative, while the government frequently adopted the nationalism narrative; with trauma being the predominant narrative displayed across the three crises and social actors. Crisis response frames of blaming, crediting, and corrective action were significantly associated with narratives of power and contestation, heroism, and nationalism, respectively. Theoretical implications for future research on crisis collective memory making on social media and suggestions for governmental crisis communication are discussed.     

Transforming collective memory: mnemonic opportunity structures and the outcomes of racial violence memory movements

While some research on collective memory has addressed the creation of memory projects such as memorials and historical commissions, less attention has been paid to explaining variation in these projects’ success. America’s troubled history of lynchings and race riots is one topic increasingly addressed by commemorative projects. This article evaluates factors shaping efforts to imprint past racial violence into broader collective memory. Building on research on constraints imposed by actual pasts and environmental conditions, I argue that structural influences on collective memory, or mnemonic opportunity structures, powerfully affect the success of commemorative initiatives. I identify three major dimensions of mnemonic opportunity structures: (1) an environment’s present-day commemorative capacity, a past incident’s (2) ascribed significance, and (3) the moral valence of key characters at the time it occurred. Qualitative data from multiple case studies and 90 interviews, along with supplementary quantitative and qualitative comparative analyses (QCAs) of all recent projects marking segregation-era racial violence, illustrate the utility of the framework.     

Issues and place: the hyperlink network of homeowner forums and implications for collective action

This paper explores the structure and the mechanisms involved in the formation of a hyperlink network of Guangzhou city's 118 homeowner forums in the context of a collective action by the homeowners. It develops a contextual analytical framework contending that the structure of the hyperlink network is influenced by utility values and utilization capability, as well as the media and social environments that shape these values, respectively. The results of the exponential random graph models support this framework. Specifically, hyperlinks are more likely to be created among neighborhood homeowner forums when the neighborhoods are located in the same administrative district, built by the same developers, and managed by the same property management companies. Unfavorable contexts that are prone to violent confrontation hamper the creation of cross-forum hyperlinks, but media visibility increases the odds of other forums hyperlinking to homeowner forums. In addition, high levels of online engagement are positively correlated with hyperlink formation. These findings suggest that although online platforms, such as homeowner forums, play a contributory role in collective action, they have limited power in fostering cross-neighborhood coalitions in urban China.     

Picturing a green virtual public space for social change: a study of Internet activism and Web-based environmental collective actions in China

While increased attention has been paid to the rise of Chinese environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), the role that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) play in these ENGOs' collective actions has rarely been investigated. Based on first-hand information gained from field research with 19 environmental NGOs in Beijing, the author identified 18 Internet-based environmental collective actions and illustrated the specific conditions under which Chinese ENGOs employ the Internet to engage in these actions. Specifically, this study developed an analytical typology of ICT for the environmental movement to examine the extent to which and conditions under which Chinese ENGOs employ ICTs, especially the Internet, for chances of mobilization and social change. From six groups of thematically classified cases, the study also uniquely compared how various web conditions combine with and mediate various structural dimensions of the campaigns to achieve a certain level of social change.     

From social movements to cloud protesting: the evolution of collective identity

This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding collective action in the age of social media, focusing on the role of collective identity and the process of its making. It is grounded on an interactionist approach that considers organized collective action as a social construct with communicative action at its core [Melucci, A. 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press]. It explains how micromobilization is mediated by social media, and argues that social media play a novel broker role in the activists' meaning construction processes. Social media impose precise material constraints on their social affordances, which have profound implications in both the symbolic production and organizational dynamics of social action. The materiality of social media deeply affects identity building, in two ways: firstly, it amplifies the ‘interactive and shared’ elements of collective identity (Melucci, 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), and secondly, it sets in motion a politics of visibility characterized by individuality, performance, visibility, and juxtaposition. The politics of visibility, at the heart of what I call ‘cloud protesting’, exacerbates the centrality of the subjective and private experience of the individual in contemporary mobilizations, and has partially replaced the politics of identity typical of social movements. The politics of visibility creates individuals-in-the-group, whereby the ‘collective’ is experienced through the ‘individual’ and the group is the means of collective action, rather than its end.