IAMCR 2016 Conference

Refocusing memory studies: the mnemonic imagination and remembering well.
Memory studies has distinguished itself through its attention to large-scale collective remembering, especially of spectacular events and ruptures. This has included a concern for the ways in which shared pasts are communicated and produced a significant body of studies critiquing the hegemonic purposes to which the past is put, whether in national political discourse or in mass-mediated representation. Some of the most significant historical events of the 20th and 21st centuries have been considered in this way, from the memorialisation of the Cambodian genocide to the mnemonic commodification of terrorist atrocities.  This has had two major consequences: firstly, a largely negative emphasis in memory studies on painful pasts and the failures and flaws of popular remembering; secondly, a diminution of attention to what happens at vernacular (meso) levels and personal and small group (micro) levels of memory work. In our talk we use our concept of the mnemonic imagination to redress this imbalance through a twin focus on vernacular memory and remembering well.  

The notion of “communication rights” has been a central theme of media scholarship and public policy activism for the past forty years. But what does it mean in today’s digital age? This is not a simple question, if only because the ‘analog’ age was characterized by communication scarcity, and hence, access to the means of communication, while the digital is characterized, among other things, by media abundance, which poses a whole new set of issues. The panelists in this session will briefly recall the role media scholars have played in framing a global agenda for communication rights, historically, and look at some of the questions that need to be addressed through the particular lenses of gender, the rights of children, and marginalized groups. Through round-table discussion and engagement with the audience, the panel will seek to explore to what extent we can speak of such a thing as universal communication rights, that apply equally to all, and whether it would be relevant to revive the international call for a “right to communicate” that could be enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or a similar global standard.