Memory is essential to Indigenous knowledge sharing, as it shapes how history, culture, and traditions are understood and maintained. Yet, the history of Settler Canada has been in contention with Indigenous understandings of the past as settler-colonialism has worked to minimize historical truths and create alternative and often blind histories. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada worked to share the lived experiences and atrocities of Indian Residential Schools and, over the last few years, has gained recognition for September 30th as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The overall aim has been to highlight the truths about Indian Residential Schools, but in doing so, Canadian society has normalized the narratives of trauma without moving forward to not only the 94 Calls to Action but what Reconciliation means, and the actions needed to undertake this responsibility as a collective for all of Canada and not just Indigenous Peoples. This article examines the role of memory and recollection from a N & ecirc;hiyawak (Four-Spirit/Plains Cree) point of view as it examines the normalization of one of Canada's greatest atrocities, further harming Indigenous Peoples.
This article examines Steve McQueen’s commemorative film Grenfell (2023) as confronting the necropolitics of the Grenfell Tower fire and its toxic aftermaths. Drawing on environmental memory studies, critical posthumanism and new materialism, the film is read as reorienting commemoration towards material conditions and toxic afterlives. In considering the longue durée of colonial governance, racial capitalism and institutional neglect, it examines how McQueen’s durational aerial footage resists interpretive closure and aesthetic sanitisation. This is read as making present the materially and politically embedded legacies of British imperialism. In attending to the commemorative vitality of matter, the article then locates Grenfell within an Anthropocenic memorial landscape.
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 article examines the primary characteristics of two distinct Berlin commemorative cultures during the Cold War, as reflected in plaques dedicated to the resistance against the Nazi regime. In East Berlin, the plaques primarily honoured communist resistance, serving to legitimise state power. In contrast, in West Berlin, they predominantly emphasised conservative-military and Christian resistance, functioning both as symbolic markers of a process of moral restitution and as material evidence of an anderes Deutschland ('Another Germany'). The article focuses on two districts located on opposite sides of the East-West divide: Steglitz in the West and Friedrichshain in the East, where forms of resistance, their subsequent commemoration and their present-day legacy have diverged significantly.
