This article offers a new way to think about objects of memory, focusing on how a single item can take on various roles – from a cherished personal keepsake through a commercial product to a powerful political symbol. By examining the ‘Bring Them Home’ dog tags created in response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, the article explores how these dog tags emerged as expressions of empathy for the hostages and their families, then evolved into a powerful symbol of the current historic moment, and eventually came to reflect diverse political positions on the conflict and even on broader human rights issues. Drawing from media reports, interviews, and visual evidence, the article highlights how these dog tags were worn during local protests, featured in international discussions, dominated the Israeli public space, and were integrated into everyday life, serving as a compact representation of both political identity and protest.

This article examines Russian national future thinking during the war in Ukraine. It views future thinking as a form of mediated action that is dependent on narrative tools and explores the structure and function of various types of narratives that play a role, including schematic narrative templates and national narrative projects. The first section of the article goes into conceptual issues on plot, the sense of an ending and other features of narrative logic that assign meaning to events. The second part of the article goes into how these issues play a role in shaping Russian ideas about the war in Ukraine. Using sources such as Russian social media, we examine how the narratives used by Putin and widely accepted by the broader population have changed over the course of the war in Ukraine. After initially focusing on denazification and other issues specific to Ukraine, the Russian narrative has moved on to more established and general themes about existential threats from military threats and alien ideas from the West. To recognize what has changed and what has not, we harness the notion of a national narrative project, which is an underlying code in the form of a national autobiography for Russia. The sense of an ending for this national narrative template has religious overtones and a telos about redemption that follows suffering. It is narrative with a sense of an ending in the future, which means using it has the future and future thinking built into it.

This article examines how WhatsApp functions as a space where people shape collective memory and challenge dominant sociopolitical narratives. Focusing on Nigeria’s Obidient movement, a youth-led campaign that supported Peter Obi in the 2023 presidential election, this article seeks to understand how everyday online interactions on WhatsApp produced alternative ways of remembering and forgetting. In other words, this articles asks, How did members of an unofficial Obidient WhatsApp group enact counter-memory practices regarding Nigeria’s 2023 general elections? To answer this question, this study deployed the ethnographic approach and drew from Foucault’s concept of counter-memory and assemblage theory to understand how memory, technology, and social interaction converged in dynamic ways. The results indicate that members of the WhatsApp group construct and circulate alternative narratives that challenge mainstream sociopolitical accounts. These results are discussed in two central themes: ‘Counter-memory and the construction of alternative narrative’ and ‘WhatsApp as a mnemonic community and assemblage’. Through practices of circulating first-hand experiences and lived testimonies, evidence of electoral misconducts, and memories of past elections and protests, members collectively produced what the author described as a ‘mnemonic community’, a space where memory is created, negotiated, and sustained through interaction. However, these practices are not independent but are shaped by the interconnectedness of human (members of the group) and non-human (WhatsApp, smartphones, or multimedia content) factors. Overall, this article argues that messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, significantly shape how people remember and interpret sociopolitical movements and participation.

This article adopts an integrated practice-led and practice-based methodology, framed through an essayistic approach to comics-based research, using our own artistic practices, one from Serbia and one from India, as case studies. Through works addressing the fall of democratic values, memories of conflicts, rise of nationalism, and ecological devastation, we examine how urgency shapes creation, reflection, and the mediation of memory in comics-making. Rather than a reactionary impulse, we conceptualize urgency as a relational and iterative condition that unfolds through political-ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions, and one that structures how artists act, think, and draw in response to crises. In our practices, drawing functions as both an act of remembering and a form of thinking: essayistic comics-making materializes a dialogue between immediacy and reflection, as well as between lived experience and its critical rearticulation. We argue that through this interplay, comics-making becomes a mode of situated knowledge production, where memory, testimony, and critique are interwoven. The essayistic form enables urgency to be inhabited rather than merely depicted, turning the creative process itself into a reflective space of resistance and inquiry. By tracing how these dynamics operate within specific socio-political contexts, this paper expands the understanding of comics-making as a medium of embodied memory and a method of research that translates lived urgency into thought and form.

Automation anxiety is reshaping British game development at a moment when generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is being positioned as both creative catalyst and labour-displacing threat. Grounded in anthropology and in dialogue with social theory and memory studies, we examine how developers experience ‘life on the edge of time’ in a sector tasked with future-making amid intersecting constraints and expectations. Through ethnographic vignettes, we contend that anxiety operates as a temporal orientation, one that is fundamentally polytemporal: a condition that folds together industry memories of past technological surges, intensifies present pressures, and animates competing projections of what comes next. We show how automation anxiety exceeds individual experience to function as a collective, industry-wide condition, revealing how industry memory operates as both repetition and interpretive resource in moments of technological upheaval. By situating automation anxiety at the intersection of media rhetoric, collective memory, and technological innovation, this article advances a sociocultural account of anxiety as a polytemporal orientation capable of both constraining and catalysing possible futures.

The assumption that deleted digital information is irretrievably lost remains widespread, yet this belief obscures the continued existence of residual traces within archives, backups, and systems that implement only partial or ‘soft’ deletion. Such remnants, though frequently overlooked, may persist in shaping the operation of artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore warrant critical examination. This article addresses three interrelated questions. First, through what mechanisms do obsolete or concealed data fragments re-enter AI systems and exert influence that manifests as bias or distortion? Second, in what ways might the trajectory of digital information be conceptualised through reference to ecological processes such as decomposition, renewal, and systemic adaptation? Third, what forms of regulatory or procedural innovation – here articulated as a model of ‘digital composting’ – could facilitate the identification, evaluation, and responsible management of residual data? The analysis demonstrates that outdated data frequently function as ‘ghost inputs’. Despite their invisibility, these elements shape the generative capacity of AI, modify the narratives it produces, and subtly recalibrate public discourse as well as shared cultural memory. Their persistence underscores the communicative and social significance of digital traces once presumed to be obsolete. To advance this discussion, the article introduces the concept of a ‘Data Decay Pathway’. This framework offers a novel means of addressing accountability and transparency in digital systems, emphasising that processes of digital decay, much like those observed in natural ecosystems, may serve either to sustain the vitality of collective memory or to propagate forms of distortion and systemic vulnerability.

An examination of the relationship between constructs of individual and collective memory and the realities of exile cannot be fully possible without an exploration of the exile media coverage of the various groups of refugees in the different countries where they pursued integration into the majority society. This paper explores the migratory experiences of refugees from Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century. It reflects on the issue of migration and memory by means of research into media coverage of the large-scale migration wave of refugees from the communist dictatorship between 1948 and 1989. The text develops the theory of an alternative or surrogate public sphere, in a wider conceptualisation, which was created by refugees in the West. The paper works with the concept of ‘will to memory’, in the narrower theoretical framework, which is applied to the exile situation and which reveals the more general principles and narratives shaping the exile collective memory.

This article offers an interdisciplinary approach to the intersection of memory, narration, and migration as a fruitful theoretical framework to analyse Refugee Tales. These are the publications of the Refugee Tales Project, fostered by the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group with the goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The tales give voice to the refugees’ experience of forced displacement, asylum claim, and detention, and most of them are collaboratively narrated by the refugee and an established writer. My contention is that the exercise of (re)telling inherent in Refugee Tales can be examined in the light of the concept of communicative remembering, considering how the refugee and the writer engage in a dialogic co-construction of the refugee’s autobiographical memories. In this context, the article aims at exploring how (re)telling and remembering go hand in hand in a selection of narratives from the latest volumes of the series: Refugee Tales IV (2021) and Refugee Tales V (2024). Both include the experience of COVID-19 as a context or as content of remembering, and so the pandemic becomes one more factor in the process of giving voice and listening to the refugees’ testimonies of indefinite and arbitrary detention in the UK.

Collective crises – such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and pandemics – profoundly disrupt the symbolic and social frameworks that normally sustain everyday life. Sociological research has long shown that such crises often trigger waves of solidarity, communication, and collective mobilization. However, the psychological forces driving these social dynamics remain insufficiently understood. This article addresses this gap by proposing that anxiety and the social sharing of emotion constitute central psychosocial mechanisms underlying collective responses to crisis. Drawing on the theoretical framework of the social sharing of emotion and integrating empirical findings from studies conducted in interpersonal contexts, public gatherings, and digital communication environments, we examine how emotional responses shape the cognitive and social processes that unfold after disruptive events. We argue that the diffuse anxiety generated by collective crises stimulates rumination, information seeking, and extensive interpersonal communication. Through repeated social sharing, emotions propagate across social networks, synchronizing emotional experience and fostering social cohesion. Evidence from laboratory studies, field research, and large-scale analyses of digital communication demonstrates that these processes can reinforce collective beliefs, support social solidarity, and contribute to the reconstruction of meaning after disruption. In this perspective, emotional turbulence following collective crises, far from reflecting social disorganization, represents a fundamental mechanism through which societies transform emotional reactions into shared knowledge, collective memory, and renewed social cohesion.

This article analyses how coinciding anniversaries of the Sonderkommando revolt (7 October 1944) and the 7 October 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Israel shaped digital Holocaust memory. It contributes to the study of social media users’ reactions to the online commemorative efforts of Holocaust memory institutions. Adapting Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’, we code a small, yet rich set of X posts, comments, and quote reposts, focusing on social media users’ engagement with the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’s X account during the anniversaries. We ask how did X social media users react to Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum’s commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of the Sonderkommando revolt on the first anniversary of 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on the platform? And how can the concept of multidirectional memory be used to understand the comparative instrumentalization of Holocaust memory on social media? Our results demonstrate the utility of the multidirectional memory concept and four types of comparative instrumentalization (empathising commemoration, empathising contestation, polarising commemoration, and polarising contestation). They show that many X users reacted by highlighting the moral capacity of Holocaust memory, but that others flattened Holocaust memory or competitively equated it with or distinguished it from contemporary violence in the Middle East. The article highlights how anniversaries intensify the online entanglement of commemoration and contestation, often forcing Holocaust memory institutions into contested digital terrains where empathy, solidarity, polarisation, and competition intersect and exacerbate the ‘Catch-22’ situation they face: critiqued for drawing parallels with contemporary events or chastised for not.

This paper offers a systematic and interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary work on memory externalization, with a particular focus on how technological systems are integrated into human mnemonic practices. Drawing on the frameworks of extended cognition (EXT), the article examines how a wide range of digital technologies participate in memory processes. The paper provides a structured review of how three forms of declarative memory – semantic, episodic, and prospective – are differentially externalized through technological environments. While existing literature often discusses ‘external memory’ in general terms, it rarely distinguishes between the specific functions involved, leading to conceptual imprecision. Addressing this gap, the article develops a refined conceptual taxonomy of memory externalization. Its central contribution is the distinction between two fundamentally different externalization strategies. Cognitive offloading refers to the delegation of information to external systems in order to reduce internal cognitive load. Biloading, by contrast, refers to a strategy of redundancy in which internal and external resources jointly support memory, not by replacement but by reinforcement, enhancing reliability, well-being, autonomy, construction of narrative identity. By clarifying these distinct modes of externalization, the paper shows that memory externalization is not a uniform phenomenon but a complex pattern of cognitive delegation and coordination between neural and technological resources. This conceptual framework offers a more fine-grained understanding of how external resources, such as technology, are integrated into mnemonic processes. The article argues that this taxonomy provides a significant contribution to the contemporary philosophy of memory and opens new avenues for empirical and philosophical research on technologically EXT.

Elections are moments when nations confront uncertainty about their future and re-examine their past. The present research investigated how two temporal, group-based emotions jointly shape political preferences and behaviour: collective nostalgia (longing for the group’s past) and collective angst (concern for the group’s future). We focused on the 2024 United States federal election, examining how civic-focused nostalgia (longing for civility and institutional trust) and homogeneity-focused nostalgia (longing for cultural and moral uniformity), together with collective angst, predicted three outcomes: support for strong leadership, voting intentions, and actual voting behaviour. Participants (N = 282) completed measures of these constructs pre-election (Time 1), with voting behaviour assessed post-election (Time 2). Results revealed that both civic- and homogeneity-focused nostalgia were associated with greater general support for strong leadership, but collective angst only predicted such support when civic nostalgia was low. Homogeneity-focused nostalgia robustly predicted Trump voting intentions and behaviour, whereas civic nostalgia predicted support for Harris. Collective angst interacted with homogeneity nostalgia to amplify pro-Trump voting, suggesting that anxiety about the group’s future magnifies the political consequences of longing for a homogeneous past. These findings illuminate how emotional orientations towards the past and future jointly guide democratic decision-making.

Using the fields of memory studies and digital humanities, this article argues that there has been a shift from more collective and social memory to more personalised and individual memory. This shift, it is argued here, can be conceptualised through the psychoanalytic concept of ‘psychosis’. While the causes of the changes in our patterns of memory have been located in capitalist and neoliberal principles, the effects of the changes in our memory habits might be found in psychosis. From falling in love with machinic AI replicas to indulging in conspiracy theories to acting as if we are social media influencers or backing ourselves to win out in impossible job markets, we are inclined towards personal fantasy, often at the expense of participating in social life. But why do we do this? Why is it easier to believe a farfetched conspiracy theory or wild personal dream than it is to participate socially and collectively in the world we live in? Part of the reason, at least, is found in our increasing habitual reliance on new and emergent technologies. Often presented to us as a brand-new form of Artificial Intelligence, these generative tools are the latest update to a longer pattern in our digital world: the trend of developing ‘relationships’ with algorithms that, to larger and smaller degrees, we come to rely on for habits of cognition and recognition. By affecting our patterns of memory, these technologies produce a kind of isolation that lends itself to individual and fantastical – rather than shared and realist – thinking.

This study focuses on a unique Facebook group: ‘Cyprus Immigrants Organisation’, whose members are mostly refugees who were once held in camps in Cyprus in the late 1940s and their descendants. The study offers a content analysis of 687 posts and comments published by group members during 2022. It reveals how a Facebook group made possible, produced, and promoted narratives of a topic that receives relatively little attention in the literature, media, and other memory spaces. The study highlights the range of memory-related content and activities within a Facebook group. We found three main activities of memory work within the group: (a) Members try to shape a coherent narrative of the events; (b) Members discuss acts of remembrance, suggesting additional activities and sharing personal initiatives; (c) Members aim to emphasise their personal connection and belonging to the Cyprus exiles’ community by sharing photographs, artwork, and documents. These memory practices, alongside processes such as gathering knowledge, sharing memories, shaping narratives, and commemorating, highlight the uniqueness of a Facebook group as a platform for memory. These kinds of activities would not be possible on such a scale without the digital environment or, more specifically, a Facebook group. With numerous narratives and collaborative knowledge gathering, the group exemplifies a democratised process of multi-generational memory work and narrative construction.

A new breed of prophets – intermediaries and pastoral bros of an AI industry with metaphysical aspirations – has surfaced on the global stage during troubled times. They make great promises, offer predictions and warnings, and stake out directions for humanity. This article argues that they do so by invoking the implicit collective memory of the apocalyptic imaginary known from ancient Jewish apocalyptic writings and, more specifically, by reenacting what we call prophetic memory. Through close readings in the tradition of biblical exegesis coupled with philosophical and critical hermeneutics, we trace strong AI narratives of doom and salvation to a range of media forms such as Twitter/X postings, books, interviews, journalistic feature articles, and reporting. Through these media, AI prophets speak of the end times while simultaneously offering a new beginning for humankind, not unlike the ancient prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Prophetic memory, we submit, is furthermore a mode of ‘collective future thought’ and an instantiation of the ‘remembering-imagining-system’. While its purpose is to create stability for a particular vision for the future, there is also a productive ambivalence of order and disorder at work within the apocalyptic AI imaginary. To question this ambiguous yet extremely powerful fixture on the human horizon, there is a need, we argue, for bothering the political-religious dimensions of the hegemonic AI imaginary and for scrutinizing how the AI industry founds its power base on the clout of prophetic memory – in a time of crisis in which many look for guidance and direction.

This article examines the rise of conspiratorial thinking in wartime Russia as a response to a deeper collective anxiety – not merely the replacement of people, but the erasure of narrative agency. While the Russian version of the ‘Great Replacement’ echoes familiar Western themes such as elite betrayal, cultural erosion, and demographic decline, its central concern shifts towards symbolic displacement. Drawing on Mark Sedgwick’s interpretation of the Great Replacement as a stable narrative structure and J.V. Wertsch’s concept of narrative as a cultural tool, this article argues that conspiracy operates here as a means of reclaiming authorship in a national story whose core meanings have grown unstable. The analysis draws on social media discourse, pro-war commentary, volunteer statements, and nationalist media, showing how anxieties are shaped through emotionally resonant storylines of betrayal and erasure. Yet the reassertion of control paradoxically intensifies fragmentation, turning the Great Replacement into a narrative of narrative disappearance – where the gravest loss is not demographic, but symbolic.

There is today a growing variety of types of memory mediations that often go further than memorialisation and heritage-building. Comics are undoubtedly part of this movement as their verbal-visual storytelling form tends to prompt layered responses from reader-viewers. Reader-viewers find themselves surprised, moved, and transformed by that reading experience. In this article, we take as a case study a comic page laying out the impact of agriculture’s industrial organisation in France shared by Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings) and its sister organisation, the Bassines Non Merci collective. It is a good example to address our central questions of how multimodal languages such as this one-page comic facilitate the process of transformative learning and how such multimodal forms allow one to move from memory-making, crystallising a specific event, to an amplification of engagement that leads to collective action. In short, it allows us to study the specific mechanisms and affordances that multimodal modes of communication, such as comics, possess as tools for transformative learning. In the first section of the article, we investigate the different types of relational engagement that can lead to transformative learning in comics. The second section focusses more specifically on emotions and their role in transformative learning. Finally, we look at the specific comics mechanisms that support transformative learning. Specifically, we look at how comics create a disjunction, give meaning to that disjunction, and help reader-viewers practise real or imaginary resolution that impact identity formation.

This study examines the role of gakushū manga, or educational Japanese comics, in shaping collective memory narratives of World War II. It explores whether these works diverge from or perpetuate Japan-centric interpretations of World War II by analysing thematic trends, representational strategies, and selective memory frameworks. The findings reveal a dominant emphasis on Japanese victimhood, mainly through graphic depictions of civilian suffering, while representations of foreign victims, such as Chinese and Korean civilians, remain abstract or marginalised. The responsibility of those in positions of leadership is selectively portrayed, often exonerating figures like Emperor Hirohito, and the actions of such militaristic leaders are contextualised within broader systemic ideologies.

These manga replicate postwar narratives by foregrounding societal complicity, deliberate omission, and the delegation of the ‘Other’ to the periphery, in line with broader patterns of media-driven nationalism. They provide nuanced critiques of Japan’s wartime conduct but simultaneously maintain a selective focus that minimises Japan’s responsibilities as an aggressor. This research underscores the need for a balanced collective memory to foster reconciliation and a more inclusive understanding of wartime legacies in East Asia.