This text accompanies the performance A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars, which premiered at the Lapworth Museum of Geology in the United Kingdom on 18 March 2023, as part of the Flatpack film festival. It includes both the text and a film version, developed during a residency at the museum. Over 18 months, I had full access to the collection and archives, selecting objects that served as prompts for stories about time and memory. A central theme of the work is slippage – misremembering and misunderstanding – as a generative methodology for exploring the connection between the collection, our past, and possible futures.

A Foot, A Mouth, A Hundred Billion Stars combines analogue media and digital technologies to examine our understanding of remembering and forgetting. I used a live digital feed and two analogue slide projectors to explore the relationships between image and memory. This article does not serve as a guide to the performance but instead reflects on the process and the ideas behind the work. My goal is to share my practice of rethinking memory through direct engagement with materials. In line with the performance’s tangential narrative, this text weaves together diverse references, locations, thoughts, and ideas, offering a deeper look into the conceptual framework of the work.

In today’s ultra-connected world, personal and emotional narratives are omnipresent in media. This study examines how the emotional framing of second-hand testimonies about difficult or controversial past events influences attitudes. A sample of 154 Belgian participants, aged 18–77, evaluated their attitudes regarding Second World War (WWII) collaboration with Nazi Germany and the post-war repression before and after reading either the positively framed or negatively framed version of an ecologically valid interview. The narrative revolved around a son recounting his father’s past as a former collaborator joining the German forces during WWII. Results revealed a significant influence of the narrative’s emotional frame on attitudes towards collaboration and repression. The positively framed interview promoted more understanding attitudes towards collaboration and nuanced views on repression, while the opposite occurred with the negatively framed story, where participants viewed collaboration less favourably and regarded repression as justified and moral. Nevertheless, the role of emotions needs further investigation, exploring the medium of presentation of the narrative and considering the development of first-person narratives to elicit stronger emotional reactions.

The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war is primarily examined through official narratives, propaganda, and victims’ testimonies. However, the deeper motivations driving Russian men to enlist and fight often remain underexplored. While Western and Ukrainian media frequently attribute this to Russian propaganda, animosity towards Ukrainians, naivety, or financial incentives, these factors only partially capture the issue’s complexity. An additional motive rooted in an enduring ‘behavioral schema’ also plays a significant role. This schema is based on traditional gender roles influencing men’s decisions to engage in combat and women’s decisions to support them. By analyzing Russian social media and combatants’ writings, this research reveals how war discussions are framed by entrenched ‘traditionalist’ behavioral patterns. Utilizing Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘implicit memory’ and James V. Wertsch’s concept of narrative templates, this study elucidates not only the official narratives of the war but also the ‘hidden’ narratives that shape collective feelings and memories.

This article considers the intersecting of remembering and imagining vis à vis individual and cultural amnesia. It focuses on two artists’ films, Shona Illingworth’s video installation Time Present (2016) and Trinh-T Minh-Ha’s film, Forgetting Vietnam (2015). Time Present portrays the experience of an individual living with amnesia and further relates it to the immobility that denotes the cultural representation of the island of St Kilda (Outer Hebrides). Forgetting Vietnam questions the problematic legacy of the Vietnam War and its recollection by bridging personal and shared experiences through a portrait of Vietnam itself. Both Illingworth and Trinh use the film’s features of frames and movement to convey the emotional and affective resonances of the experiences and places presented to generate the possibility of presence. This article closely examines Time Present and Forgetting Vietnam with a focus on the films’ respective structures and thematic developments and reads them by suggesting the intersecting of remembering and imagining culturally and its potentiality for engaging with absence and silenced histories through decentralized approaches.

On January 30, 2022, Northern Ireland observed the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. On that day in 1972, the British Army opened fire on a group of unarmed protesters in Derry, killing 13 and wounding an additional 15. Bloody Sunday was a pivotal moment during the 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, a day widely considered a ‘watershed in British-Irish history’. And while 50 years have passed since this dark day, Bloody Sunday remains vivid in the collective memory of the small country. Considering the cultural and social significance of Bloody Sunday, I sought to answer a simple yet deceptively complicated question: does this still matter? In pursuing this answer, I aimed to understand how journalists and news outlets chose to mark and remember the anniversary in their January and February 2022 coverage. First, I present an overview of Bloody Sunday and its historical role as a catalyst for the three decades of the Troubles. Then, I review relevant memory studies literature in order to understand the role that commemorative news media play in the process of remembering in conflict and post-conflict environments. I then introduce my three research questions and methods before finally discussing the results of my analysis. I found that Bloody Sunday continues to be invoked against British colonialism, that key details of the day remain contested even now, and that the press presented Bloody Sunday as part of a globalised narrative of war-time atrocities.

The role of memory in supporting adolescents' sense of place and past is not well understood, but older adults offer a wealth of life stories and wisdom that they can share with younger generations. This in-depth pilot study positioned Australian high school students as oral historians to interview older Australians about their lives. Oral historian training and materials were provided, and pre- and post-intervention measures of adolescents' sense of everyday Australian history, well-being, and social connection were collected for an intervention school group (n = 17) and a waitlist control school group (n = 12). In-depth supplementary memory and well-being data were also collected for six participating older adults. In the intervention condition, scaffolded memory interviews took place during weekly aged care visits across one school term and were followed by an intergenerational celebration and memory book presentation. As hypothesised, older adults imbued their stories with life lessons for adolescents. Although no quantitative changes in participants' well-being emerged, qualitative data revealed the emergence of rich interpersonal relationships and bonding between adolescents and older adults. There were also benefits of the programme for older adults' reports of generativity and adolescents' understanding of everyday Australian history. The findings demonstrate the social and academic benefits of scaffolded intergenerational memory conversations and represent a scalable educational model and materials with downstream community benefits.

Social media challenge several established concepts of memory research. In particular, the day-to-day mundane discourse of social media blur the essential distinction between commemorative and non-commemorative memory. We address these challenges by presenting a methodological framework that explores the dynamics of social memory on various social media. Our method combines top-down data mining with a bottom-up analysis tailored to each platform. We demonstrate the application of our approach by studying how the Holocaust is remembered in different corpora, including a dataset of 5.3 million Facebook posts and comments collected between 2015 and 2017 and a 5 million Tweets and Retweets dataset collected in 2021. We first identify the mnemonic agents initiating the discussion of the memory of the Holocaust and those responding to it. Second, we compare the macro-rhythms of Holocaust discourse on the two platforms, identifying peaks and mundane discussions that extend beyond commemorative occasions. Third, we identify distinctive language and cultural norms specific to the memorialization of the Holocaust on each platform. We conceptualize these dynamics as ‘Mnemonic Markers’ and discuss them as potential pathways for memory researchers who wish to explore the unique memory dynamics afforded by social media.

Fake news can affect people in negative ways. A recent line of research has demonstrated that when people are exposed to fake news they can form false memories for the events depicted in the news stories. We conducted a meta-analysis to obtain an estimate of the average rate of false memories elicited by fake news. Thirteen articles were included in the final analysis, revealing that nearly 40% and 60% of the participants reported at least one false memory and belief (respectively) after fake news exposure, while each participant remembered or believed 22% of the total number of fake news presented. Individual differences may affect the rate of false memory formation following exposure to false memories. We therefore examined moderating effects of individual difference variables assessed in the included studies. Participants with better analytical reasoning skills and a high level of interest in the news topic were least likely to report false memories for fake news, with level of interest being also a facilitating factor in remembering true news. No effect was detected for cognitive ability and objective knowledge. Our results provide insightful and practical information in the context of world-wide misinformation dissemination and its impact on people's beliefs and memories.

For many Russians, the Russia–Ukraine war became a starting point for rethinking their identity. And thinking about their personal and national future played a significant role in this process. This article is based on the analysis of the interviews I collected during the first year of the war. It examines how imagining the future activates a variety of defense mechanisms, which can be situated in four unique, yet not mutually exclusive, defensive discourse strategies. The primary focus is the connections among future thinking, agency, defensiveness, and identity. The whole spectrum of different and, in some cases, opposite visions of the future and the fact that the majority of respondents used more than one defensive discourse strategies can be a sign of a significant fragmentation – on individual and collective levels. This fragmentation is almost invisible if we consider the public opinion polling or Putin's approval rating. This paper gives crucial insights into what remains hidden in the statistics and presents a more complex picture of Russian society in a time of war.

This paper explores how Ukrainian virtual museums of war are embedded in today's connective environment of humans, codes and algorithms. In particular, I examine the ways virtuality as a mode of memory-making is deployed by the Meta History: Museum of War to shape the mediation and remembering of the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine as it unfolds. Using digital methods and digital ethnography, this study maps the emerging assemblage of the Meta History: Museum of War to grasp how the museum is contributing to efforts to repel the Russian invasion through its artistic and material engagement with the war. By exploring the network of exhibitions and the museum's virtual infrastructure, the study illustrates how the museum generates affective instant memories in order to wield influence over events that will in turn be exhibited in the future. Consequently, it adds valuable insights into the production of virtual engagement with war.

Autobiographical memories play a vital role in shaping personal identity. Therefore, individuals often use various methods like diaries and photographs to preserve precious memories. Tattoos also serve as a means of remembering, yet their role in autobiographical memory has received limited attention in research. To address this gap, we surveyed 161 adults (68.9 per cent female, M = 26.93, SD = 6.57) to explore the life events that motivated their tattoos and to examine their most significant memories. We then compared these findings with significant memories of 185 individuals without tattoos (80.0 per cent female, M = 31.26, SD = 15.34). The results showed that the majority of tattoos were inspired by unique life events, including specific events about personal growth, relationships, leisure activities, losses, or diseases. Even when not directly tied to specific events in life, tattoos still reflect autobiographical content, such as mottos, beliefs, and values. Furthermore, the most significant memories of younger tattooed individuals (20–24 years) tended to be more normative and less stressful compared to those of their non-tattooed counterparts in the same age group, though the nature of these memories varied. This difference was not found among older participants (30–54 years). Additionally, those without tattoos indicated to use specific objects and methods for preserving important events, suggesting tattoos are only one of several ways to reminisce. However, tattoos uniquely allow for the physical embodiment of autobiographical memories, indicating that engraving significant life events in the skin aids in reflecting on one's life story.

The unanticipated product of a survey involving 190 non-professional readers, this first-report paper looks at the way memories from different source media overlap, along with the potential consequences of this phenomenon for existing approaches to reader behaviour.

The paper begins with a focus on how everyday readers articulate their recollection of literary works, in particular those moments they found most memorable. We identify a common situation in which participants ‘mix up’ recollections of a book's content with memories of their respective film or TV adaptations. We offer the term spontaneous transmedia co-location to describe this form of effortless recall involving memories of literary texts which spontaneously trigger memories of other, visual media. We outline five preliminary modes of spontaneous transmedia co-location (STC) and explain what they consist of.

Finally, we elaborate how STC ties into wider theories of how readers and other consumers interact with media, and how they tend to remember and otherwise connect them in a transmedia space.

Experiences that take place in virtual reality (VR) become part of users’ autobiographical memory. As memories can impact users’ self-perception, personal beliefs, and social interactions, storyliving in VR narratives can be used to manipulate memory and mould users’ self according to the preferences of the VR narrative creators. Poland's Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has, in recent years, generously invested in the production of VR films that depict events from the Polish historical canon. VR is a spatial technology that positions users ‘inside’ a virtual storyworld and leverages users’ sense of body position and movement to enhance memory and a sense of presence. Three dimensions of presence – self, social, and spatial – are relevant to understanding the role of VR in the politics of memory. The article interrogates a recent Polish VR production, Wiktoria 1920 (2020, dir. Tomasz Dobosz), and argues that VR representations exploit a sense of presence to shape users’ memory, perspective, and emotions in relation to the past.

Autobiographical memories show a temporal pattern with relatively many events recalled from the recent past (recency) and from adolescence to early adulthood (reminiscence bump), and very few events recalled from the first few years of life (childhood amnesia). The current study examined a temporal pattern for external memory – information stored outside of one's brain. Three survey studies asked participants to choose which age(s) in their life they would most want to keep photos from, supposing they had many photos from every year. Participants chose 1 year of photos in Study 1, which sampled undergraduates (N = 499, median age = 19), and in Study 2, which sampled online participants using stratified age brackets (N = 252, age range 18–82). Participants chose 3 years of photos in Study 3, which sampled online participants over 40 using stratified age brackets (N = 240, age range 40–93). Participants’ choices largely showed preferences for time periods likely to be well remembered (recency and the reminiscence bump). Qualitative coding of participants’ reasons for their choices showed common themes, such as positive emotions, connections to other people and pets, life milestones, personal growth, and school. Results suggest that in the case of photos, external memory served to mostly enhance or enrich internal memory and less often to compensate for internal memory.

Conversational remembering entails that people engage in recalling past experiences, which may themselves have been shared. Conversational remembering comes with social benefits for the person telling the narrative and the one receiving it (e.g., developing and strengthening friendships, fostering entertainment, and consolidating group identity). COVID-19 lockdowns have significantly affected social interaction, including face-to-face interactions where conversational remembering occurs. The aim of this study was to explore how WhatsApp group messages supported conversational remembering in a large group of friends living in Buenos Aires where a complete lockdown was established between 19 March 2020 and 6 November 2020. To accomplish such aim, we conducted a mixed-methods longitudinal study. The data consisted of 32,810 WhatsApp group messages collected over a period of 700 consecutive days, from 13 April 2019 to 13 March 2021. Our study shows that WhatsApp group messages enabled group members to keep connected during the COVID-19 lockdown period. This occurred by remembering together situations, events, and actions associated with the group's identity. The use of WhatsApp group messages may have represented an adaptive collective behaviour in response to changes in global social norms.

In this article, I examine efforts to rewrite school history in Putin's Russia, efforts whose precedents in Russia can be traced back to the nineteenth century. I explore this process from the perspective of recent scholarship on ‘collective future thinking’ and demonstrate how a particular feeling – anxiety – shaped Russian and Soviet efforts to change history textbooks. I describe those created in Russia, focusing on their future component and the emotional message accompanying them. In contrast to some other countries, where narratives may be revised or replaced by new ones in accordance with the development of societies and political regimes, in Russia, there is evidence that previous narrative templates continue to coexist. The state may privilege one or another narrative primary in response to emotional pressures, and in some cases, this pushes people towards aggression and even death. I argue that anxiety about the future has forced the current Russian regime to initiate a school history rewriting in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war, allowing the state to use collective memory to convince people to engage in a brutal conflict.

While the history and practices of collecting have received considerable attention over the past few decades, the notion of erasure – of the deleting, removal or destruction of material, whether deliberate or otherwise – has remained largely in the shadows. We challenge this neglect by placing erasure centre stage and treating it as a productive phenomenon in its own right. Indeed, we suggest that it forms a significant precondition for the very possibility of memory and collections. This article draws upon a recent turn to consider questions of forgetting, ignorance and ending to lay out the grounds for analysing the various roles played by erasure in making and unmaking our world. Inspired by Paul Connerton's discussion of different types of forgetting, we present five distinct forms of erasure that we regard as principally important: (i) repressive erasure, (ii) protective erasure, (iii) operative erasure, (iv) amending erasure and (v) calamitous and neglectful erasure. In each case, we discuss the characteristic logic of the erasure at hand and provide examples of the historical and media-specific forms in which it has been enacted. Our aim in doing so is to provide future researchers with some of the analytical tools and perspectives necessary to engage in further erasure studies. For if we are interested in making sense of the shifting and complex world we inhabit, then the interdisciplinary study of the compelling yet elusive phenomenon of erasure is an excellent place to start.

In the BBC show, The Repair Shop, members of the public bring their cherished but crumbling possessions into a workshop populated by expert craftspeople, who carry out restorations. These objects arrive as treasured possessions, which, despite their dilapidated state, still hold memories and meaning for their owners, albeit memories that may have faded as the object itself has aged. Something magical seems to take place after the objects are restored, however. The restored objects seem to reanimate and revive the memories that their owners have invested in them. How is it possible that this restoration can bring memories held by the objects back to life? What is special about The Repair Shop restoring objects to their former glory? We outline two ways in which objects can be evocative and embody emotion, memory, and meaning. We then outline the ways in which the restoration of these objects to something like their original form can improve scaffolded recall and bring memories back to life. For one class of evocative objects, the restoration enhances recall by reinstating details from the context in which the memories were encoded. For the second class of evocative objects, their restoration affords an imaginative connection to the past, which enables them to become powerful focal points of memory and shared narratives. In effect, The Repair Shop seems to work not only as a repair shop of objects but as a repair shop of memory too.