119 research outputs found
The new grey of memory: Andrew Hoskins in conversation with Huw Halstead
Full text linkAndrew Hoskins – interviewed by Huw Halstead – discusses the tensions and paradoxes of memory and place in the connective era. Digital media liberate memory from the spatial archive, but they also create a connective compulsion and dependency, a disconnect from the present moment and a loss of control over memory. The overwhelming abundance and immediacy of digital data breed a placelessness of the digital traces of ourselves, an algorithmic narrowing of information, knowledge and life. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified this compulsion to record to such an extent that it may be considered a new memory boom, an obsessive desire to remember. Locative and mobile technology may seem to locate us in space more than ever before, but they do so in ways that are beyond our comprehension: our smartphones know more about our locatedness than we do, ushering in a ‘new grey’ in digital memory. Yet, it is critical to be aware of the variegated geography of connective memory – and of Memory Studies itself
Ethnokafenology:Oral testimony, space, and the noise of the everyday in Western Thrace, Greece (c. 1939-2013)
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Finding Meaning in 'Peripheral' Sources:Subscription Lists and 'Everyday Anarchism' in Late Ninteenth-Century Argentina
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Atmosphere, the city and everyday life in Barcelona, 1909: the journal of the widow of Trias
No full textMatthew Kerry unpicks the handwritten journal of a widow belonging to the social elite of Barcelona during the upheaval of the ‘Tragic Week’ in 1909. He demonstrates that personal accounts of extraordinary moments such as these not only chronicle the events they describe, but also—precisely because they document abnormal sights and sounds and disruptions to everyday rhythms—provide insight into everyday life in ordinary times
Wolfgang Jahn’s Handwritten Letter to the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR): ‘Coming Out’ in 1970s West Germany
Full text linkThis book is the first of its kind to present readers with the rich and innovative source base deployed by scholars studying everyday life in the modern era. Twenty-eight researchers from diverse intellectual and disciplinary standpoints each present a favourite primary source for studying the history of everyday life, accompanied by a reflective commentary on the benefits, challenges, and potential pitfalls of using their chosen material.
The sources included range from ego documents (diaries, memoirs, letters), oral testimonies, ethnographic fieldnotes, newspapers, magazines, and official documents to photographs, film, maps, floor plans, drawings, material objects, and instant messages. They cover topics and themes as varied as individual mentalities, emotions, identities, sense of place, sexuality, and agency; experiences of space, violence, war, childhood, humour, the body, and the senses; and the history of nationalism, diplomacy, political activism, youth culture, tourism, memory, dictatorship, colonialism, and race and racism.
This book demonstrates not only the texture and fascination of people’s everyday lives, but also what a critical reading of this microscale can reveal about the broader sweep of history. It will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students alike interested in everyday life, in micro- and local-scales of analysis, and in the study of history and society ‘from below’
‘The pawns that they moved here and there’? Microacts, room for manoeuvre, and everyday agency in the 1974 Cyprus conflict
Full text linkOral testimonies from Greek Cypriots who lived through the Greek dictatorship’s 1974 coup d’état on Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion frequently present the narrators as mere pawns in a macro-scale historical drama, having little to no control over or understanding of the broader events unfolding around them. On one level, this rings true, as individual soldiers and civilians were rarely if ever able to dictate or perceive the broader trajectories of the conflict in which they found themselves. Yet this perspective belies the subtler reality that even in chaotic conditions and under deeply restricted circumstances people exercise agency and create spaces, however small, in which to operate as autonomous agents and to shape their own personal trajectories. Whilst they could not leave the chessboard, these ‘pawns’ actively moved themselves here and there, performing microacts that locally refracted official diktats and ideologies in mutable ways. Moreover, in the construction of their testimonies they assert further agency, assembling these microacts into meaningful narratives by placing them within broader historical frameworks.Peer reviewe
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