The massacre of 7 October 2023 profoundly reshaped Israeli society and produced new practices of commemoration in the public sphere. This article examines the proliferation of commemorative stickers, which intervene in the public sphere as mobile mnemonic sites. I argue that these stickers constitute a form of memory activism, through which citizens influence collective remembrance outside official institutions, and that they embody the exercise of the Right to Memory. The findings also reveal how stickers create a hybrid memory space, bridging material practices in the physical public sphere with digital extensions through hashtags, QR codes, and online circulation. Approached from a post-digital perspective, the stickers complicate assumptions that digital media supersede offline commemoration, showing instead how non-digital interventions retain cultural and political force. This case contributes to international debates on grassroots commemoration, the materialities of memory, and the politics of remembrance in the digital age.
This introductory essay to the special issue Decolonizing Memory Studies, Reclaiming the Study of Memories critiques the persistent Euro-centric paradigms and epistemological hierarchies that dominate the field of Memory Studies. Drawing on insights from thinkers such as Toni Morrison, Merlinda Bobis, and Walter Mignolo, among others, the authors outline three central challenges for the discipline: exposing the limitations of dominant Western memory frameworks, integrating concepts from postcolonial and Indigenous scholarship, and practicing “epistemological disobedience.” The issue is structured across four thematic sections—Indigenous Concepts, Provincializing the West, Transitional Justice, and Memory Pedagogy. By centering grassroots-storytelling, embodied archives, and Indigenous cosmovisions—including concepts like Ubuntu/Hunhu and Agaciro—the contributors dismantle the normative authority of Western Europe in knowledge production. Ultimately, the introductory essay calls for provincializing, de-Westernizing, and uncolonizing the study of memory, advocating for transformative inclusivity, repair, and a holistic ecological relationality between humans, ancestors, and the Earth.
Taking Ada Lovelace’s careful orchestration of her own funeral and interment as a point of departure, this article examines how her memory has been constructed, mediated, and mobilised across time. It introduces the concept of memory machines to trace the layered entanglements of material traces, emotional residues, and institutional practices through which women mathematicians are remembered. Focusing on Lovelace’s meta-archive—understood as a shifting field of documents, silences, and curatorial choices—the article explores how memory takes shape not only through what is preserved but through affective attachments and archival infrastructures. Memory machines provide a framework for mapping these operations without reducing them to narrative recovery or linear commemoration. In conclusion, the article reflects on the broader implications of this approach for the historiography of women in mathematics, suggesting new ways of engaging with archival remains as sites of encounter, interpretation, and imaginative reconstruction.
This study offers a typology of mediated de-commemoration—how acts of de-commemoration are represented and mobilized through cultural products. Drawing on the analysis of cultural products centered on the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, England (2020), the research identifies four types of mediated de-commemoration: Justification—establishing moral grounds for the toppling; Reflecting division—presenting the toppling as social cleavage to mitigate polarization; Vernacular appropriation and Amplification—asserting the toppling as a local radical act to mobilize solidarity; De-exceptionalization—challenging the toppling’s singularity by situating it within ongoing activism to shift focus toward its broader meaning. This typology reveals how various actors engage with and reinterpret de-commemoration acts for different purposes, demonstrating temporal aspects of these mediations and their interaction with public discourse, government actions, and one another. The study provides critical insights into how memory activism, when mobilized as memory of activism, becomes a site of competing meanings.
The present commentary explores the implicit and explicit role of skateboarding and skate studies in upholding Russian colonial practices in, and the coloniality of knowledge on, the territories of the former Soviet Union. Addressing Duncan McDuie-Ra’s article ‘The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries’, I argue for the need to consider more openly how the power relations extant in leisure practices may shape the region’s construction both in geopolitical terms and within academic discourse. In doing so, this examination urges a broader reconsideration of how skateboarding is analysed while simultaneously adding to the understanding of memoryscapes in the post-Soviet context.
This article is a literature review of the post-colonial and decolonial takes on some of the core debates of the study of collective memory. Zubrzycki and Woźny argue that the three main anchors of this study have been focused on its impact on creating national identity, reckoning with collective trauma, and collective memory’s movement beyond nation-state borders. However, what remains persistently minimal in our main conceptualizations of these anchors is the role of colonialism in their development. What also has been a significant oversight in our theorizing of collective memory and its transnationalism is the inclusion of all parts of the globe in our analysis, specifically the inclusion of often neglected perspectives of collective memory from other regions like the Amazonia, the Caribbean, and the African continent. Taking postcolonial and decolonial approaches allow us to rethink our understanding of nation-state borders, solidarity around trauma, and forgetting.
This study explores memory activism and emotion during the 1989 Romanian Revolution, addressing a gap in existing memory studies on this event. Drawing on 60 video interviews with participants in the revolution, the study uses a deductive approach to examine how personal narratives serve as memory activism. Integrating the history of emotions with memory activism, we analyze how witnesses were emotionally mobilized during and after the revolution. We show how the shift from collective euphoria to post-revolutionary disillusionment shapes participants’ search for mnemonic justice. Memories of fear transitioned into memories of revenge against former communist leaders, then further into disappointment with post-revolution leaders. These memories, as “truth stories,” expose unresolved social justice issues in post-communist Romania, especially concerning responsibility for the 1989 events and obligations to victims. This study offers a broad perspective on memory activism and uniquely contributes to understanding post-communist transitions by demonstrating how individual testimonies shape collective memory and challenge dominant narratives.
This article focuses on how consumer platforms normalize forgetting by design through three widely integrated features: Microsoft Recall (over-capture), Google Ask Photos (curated retrieval), and Apple Journal (preemptive guidance). It develops a tripartite matrix of algorithmic forgetting from these cases, situating them within a broader forgetting ecology. Drawing on empirically grounded, qualitative materials (official platform communications, technology journalism/expert commentary, and selected Reddit discussions), the analysis critically traces how each feature reshapes what becomes visible, retrievable, and documentable in everyday life. Recall shifts forgetting into filtering and self-management under conditions of saturation. Ask Photos organizes remembering through selective retrieval, a form of operative erasure in which traces remain stored but, when not surfaced, slip out of practical reach. Journal steers inscription in advance through prompts and defaults that privilege certain kinds of experiences over others. Across cases, claims of convenience and wellbeing can mask structured omissions, narrowing the space for reflective and contested engagement with the past. The study offers “modalities of algorithmic forgetting” as an analytic lens to explore consumer “AI memory” features and their socio-political effects.
This article aims to further develop a concept that I recently coined in my postcolonial exploration of Kurdistani memory culture: that of the "apostrophic museum." The term "apostrophic" is derived from the fields of rhetoric and poetry. It refers to a figure of speech that addresses an absent object or person, making the reader or listener into an "overhearer." Through close-readings of the Yasser Arafat Museum in Ramallah and the Museum of Amna Suraka: In Order Not to Forget in Sulaymaniyah, it is shown that apostrophic memory sites, located in postcolonial societies, depict national heroes that address a homeland - in this case, Palestine and Kurdistan - and engage visitors as "overhearers" of this addressing. The article extends my earlier analysis of apostrophic museums by indicating how these two case studies shape two apostrophic acts, drawing on Frans-Willem Korsten's analysis of apostrophic forms of address and Gilles Deleuze's concept of virtuality. A first apostrophic act revolves around national heroes who apostrophize their countries, which gain a virtual quality. A second apostrophic act makes visitor into witnesses who turn away from these heroes to report to various others about what they have seen.
This afterword situates the special issue within current debates in memory studies. The concept of "dialogical remembering" opens a productive conversation with "agonistic memory," developing a relational and non-binary approach to conflictual pasts. Moreover, the concept is a productive methodological and analytical complement to the perspective of "slow memory" providing one of the means by which slow memory instances can be empirically traced.
