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PROJECT INFORMATION
Digital Memories is a Project funded by the European Research Council and carried out at KU Leuven, which objective is to provide a theoretical model to analyze traumatic events that acquire a global dimension in digital environments, bringing together the perspective of memory studies, cultural studies, media studies, law, sociology, visual culture and history. For this, it takes as its main object of study the case of the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, in September 2014.
Collective memory has been a continuous object of study since 1980. We know a lot about how nations remember and also about the role of transnational media in the way in which some events are recorded and broadcast. However, the acceleration of globalization has dramatically changed this scenario: digital media has greatly affected the relationship between media and memory and has facilitated the transnationalization of memory.
QUESTIONS TO SOLVE
Considering digital technology, transnational actors and the human rights discourse as crucial elements of the transnationalization of memory, the project addresses the following questions:
How do digital media promote new forms of political agency? How can we evaluate the role of new media in the construction of new types of mnemonic objects without subscribing to the thesis of digital memory as a completely fluid and free floating entity? How do global actors use transnational strategies to intervene in a local / national context? Can disappearance, as a technology of repression that erases the borders between life and death, present and past, materiality and immateriality, become a model to interrogate the dynamics of digital memory?
At CONEXX-EU we have created an explanatory video to introduce the Digital Memories project to the public
