Social media networks emerged as an increasingly active field for community interactions and institutional interventions entangling cultural heritage and perceptions of the past with the formation of contemporary identities, and attitudes towards important social, cultural, political and ethical issues. They become sites for the formation of affiliative relationships, but also arenas for ‘memory wars’, involving grassroots and institutional mnemonic actors, and enabled by a combination of digital platform affordances and semiotic activity.
Organized by the Connective Research Group Faculty of Communication, Vilnius University
This two-day, in-person symposium brings together an international cross-disciplinary community of scholars engaged with research on cultural heritage, memory and identity practices. Focusing on social media, it aims to address substantive, theoretical and methodological questions related to grassroots and institutional semiotic practices, especially on social media platforms, involving communicative memory and post-memory of the difficult, traumatic and excluded heritages of Eastern Europe, and beyond. These may include studies of:
- meanings and identifications ascribed to historical events, individuals, places and symbols in social media conversations
- pragmatics and rhetorics of social media communication involving heritage and the difficult past
- conceptual metaphors, narratives, and discourses in social digital memory
- homophily, echo chambers and filter bubbles
- mnemonic actors and online communities
- disinformation and misinformation processes involving heritage and the past
- memory wars and memory activism
- the social digital post-memory of the Holocaust
- communicative memories of historical trauma, war, and genocide
- commemorative practices and conflicts around monuments
- populist, banal nationalist, anti-science, and anti-liberal practices and effects
- social digital memory work by museums, archives, and other memory institutions
- methodological and theoretical issues in social digital memory research
- qualitative, computational and mixed research methods
- social media archiving and digital curation
The symposium is organised in the context of Connective Digital Memory in the Borderlands, a research project funded by the European Social Fund under grant agreement 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-17-0027 with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT). The overarching goal of the project is to reveal how memory practices on SNS inside and outside Lithuania, mediated by contested heritage, enable the production of overlapping cultural identities at the transnational, national and intersectional level, while advancing digital curation knowledge to save Lithuanian social digital memory from future obsolescence. The symposium will be an opportunity for participants, including the transdisciplinary research team of the Connective project, to share and exchange insights on methods, approaches and findings of research on issues of social digital memory, contested heritage and cultural identity construction, and their theoretical and methodological implications.