ECREA16-Abstract

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Thursday, November 10

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this assertion we discuss our experiences of researching the mnemonic use of digital images in action – with ‘in action’having a twofold meaning related

to the processual nature of our investigations and the empirical context of our cases, that of social movements and activism. The first case study concerns

a photograph taken during a political rally in 1985 in the Swedish city of Växjö, which shows a woman striking a neo-Nazi with her handbag. Circulating

originally through the international press the image more recently went‘viral’online with the approach of its 30

anniversary, a growth in its contemporary

relevance and local calls to have its medial moment concretized as a memorial. Adopted as a symbolic rallying point by transnationally connected European

far-left grassroots groups, the photograph’s spread looks set to continue. Overall a discussion of this case will serve to demonstrate how hybridised digital

and digitized methods can help highlight the multidirectional digital afterlives of historical photographs and their changing prevalence online. The second

case study is on the Facebook“cause”page Justice for Mike Brown, set up a day after the shooting of African-American teenager Michael Brown. It introduces

platform analysis as a method to analyse memory work. Platform analysis is an emerging field of critical inquiry that scrutinizes the political economy,

design, practices and technology of social media platforms. Discourse in formalized spaces such as Justice for Mike Brown is produced, interpreted and

practiced in interaction with the coded interface of Facebook. Which negotiations and re-mediations vis-à-vis memory flow out of this interaction between

users and the platform?The case will specifically focus on the trajectories of two commemorative portraits of Brown that went‘viral’on and outside the page

and show how Facebook allowed ‘connective’memory work with them.

PN 061

Heritage Tourism and the Dynamics of Transnational Mnemonic Encounters

A. Pfoser

, E. Keightley

Loughborough University, Social Sciences, Loughborough, United Kingdom

Literature on transnational memory has focused predominantly on the circulation of memories through films and the web as well as on the role of inter‑

national migration and grassroots activism, leaving aside how tourism mobilities relate to transnational memory. Bringing together literature on heritage

studies and memory studies, the paper seeks to offer an exploration of the potential of heritage tourism as a site of transnational memory work. Heritage

tourism is a form of special interest tourism that involves travelling to experience built heritage places, artefacts and activities. Even when articulated within

a transnational framework heritage tourism is commonly associated with stability: institutions produce and circulate authorised (national) discourses and

visions of a sanitised past, which are subsequently consumed by visitors. Authors working in heritage studies however have developed more dynamic

conception of heritage as cultural and social process that involves multiple actors and creates ways to understand and engage with the past in the present.

Combining this more dynamic conception with the literature on transnational memory we can conceive of heritage tourism in terms of transnational

encounters between tourists and hosts in which (national) memories are negotiated and contested. Heritage tourism can reinforce national difference but

also lead to a reconstitution of social relations and communities through exchange. The paper explores the dynamics and politics of these transnational

encounters drawing on a pilot study on Russian heritage tourism to the Estonian capital of Tallinn.

PN 062

Social Movements and the Challenges of Transnationalising Remembrance: Examining Media Literacy and Memory Work

P. Bisht

Keele University, Media- Communications & Culture, Staffordshire, United Kingdom

The work of social movement organisations (SMOs) has remained under-examined in the burgeoning accounts of collective memory’s mediatised tran‑

scendence of the nation state (Kubal and Becerra 2014). The limited accounts that do exist tend to focus almost exclusively on instances of ‘successful’

memory-work where SMOs have managed to skillfully‘scale up’the remembrance of particular events beyond national frameworks, confounded state-level

institutions, and achieved social and political justice through accessing transnational networks and forums and building transnational solidarities (Conway

2010). The analytical neglect of negative case studies involving unsuccessful or only partially successful attempts at transnational memory-work has meant

that constraints and inequalities characterising these emergent political fields have not been brought into focus. In particular, constraints and inequalities

linked to vastly differing levels of media access and media literacy amongst social movement participants have been almost entirely invisible (Constan‑

za-Chock 2014). Quite tellingly, these analytical blind spots have also been accompanied by a lack of case studies from the global south. In this paper, I will

seek to shine some light on these neglected issues through an examination of memory politics surrounding the Bhopal gas disaster. SMOs working in Bhopal

have been seeking to develop a transnational remembrance for the disaster, foregrounding the continuing soil and groundwater contamination, and mak‑

ing transnational linkages with toxic disasters from other times and places (Bisht 2013). Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Bhopal (2010–2014), I

will demonstrate how these SMOs have only been partially successful in their attempt at forging an environmentalism based transnational remembrance,

examining in particular, their inability to stabilise a transnational memory narrative for their local participants. I will connect the constraints experienced by

the SMOs to glaring inequalities in media literacy between movement leadership and the majority of movement participants. Overall, beyond addressing

the specific areas of knowledge linked to SMOs identified above, the paper will respond to the broader demands for a shift away from an exclusive focus

on the multi-directionality and connectivity of memory towards a concurrent examination of both opportunities and constraints in transnational memo‑

ry-work (Rothberg 2011; Amine and Beschea-Fache 2012).