Memory Studies

This editorial introduces the 12 articles collected in this special issue on Remembering Activism: Explorations in the memory-activism nexus. It frames the articles within current debates in the field of memory studies and social movement studies on the entanglements between memory work, on the one hand, and activism directed towards social transformation, on the other. In particular, it highlights the ways in which the memory of earlier activism is mobilised within later movements; in the process, it also identifies various forms of activist memory work where remembrance is an integral part of the activist repertoire and one of the means used to achieve political ends.

Contributing to the growing literature on the memory-activism nexus, this article analyses how activists remember past activism. For social movements and activists, memories of past mobilisations represent both an asset and a burden. This article seeks to contribute to existing research on memory in activism by identifying recurrent patterns of how activists remember and forget previous mobilisations across different movements. Based on interviews with activists of the Global Justice Movement (1998–2007) and the Blockupy movement (2012–2015), four mnemonic modes are identified. These entail two types of mnemonic adoption, which highlight continuity with a positive or negative valence attached, and two types of mnemonic rejection, which highlight discontinuity with a positive or negative valence attached. I show how similar patterns of these mnemonic modes can be found across the two movements and their diverse subgroups. At the same time, however, these mnemonic patterns differ depending on the degree of activists’ identification with the overall movement; while activists who strongly identify with the movement in question remember failures of past mobilisations and their differences to current ones more clearly than similarities and successes, the opposite is the case for activists with low identification attachments.

The history of the 1990s and of political life in Serbia can be viewed as a history of protest. It was during this decade, in which Slobodan Milošević held power, that an entire generation of activists became part of a process of learning to engage in civil resistance. In waves of massive anti-regime protests as well as in smaller, yet persistent, anti-war protests, they asserted that ‘Belgrade is the World’. This article examines the ways in which practices and themes from these protests have resurfaced more recently, and how this activism is remembered and referenced in the 2020s. Based on data collected in Belgrade during anti-regime protests in 2023, which began as a movement ‘against violence’ (‘protiv nasilja’), it traces how the memory of protest of the 1990s turned into memory in protest as it appeared in banners, chants, slogans and speeches, as well as in everyday conversation among citizens, some three decades later. Deploying the concept of the memory-activism nexus, the article analyses generational claims in Serbia, the practices of protesters, their hope in activism, their fear of cultivating false expectations and their continuing demands for a better future. It places cultural memory in Serbia in the context of a politics of disappointment, illustrating that memory in protest can function as both a mobilising force and a source of political paralysis.

This article examines the impact of commodification on the memory-activism nexus in relation to the cultural afterlife of Deniz Gezmiş. It reframes discussions of the ‘commodification’ of the revolutionary in terms of ‘celebrification’ and examines why this process generates social unease in Turkey. It shows that this anxiety emerges from the perception that once memory is brought into the circuit of exchange-value, it risks losing its use-value in activism. Cultural memory is indeed becoming increasingly mediated by market relations. Yet, this article calls attention to activist remembrance which occurs within the interstices of capitalist property relations and is therefore not necessarily dependent on the market. As such, it supports a shift from the ‘passive consumer’ paradigm to the recognition of the political and narrative agency of remembering subjects, demonstrating that people often contest processes of commodification, especially in the context of anti-capitalist activism.

Owing to its gendered connotations of powerlessness, passivity and lack of agency, victimhood is an uncomfortable category for many veteran women activists from the left-wing revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Based on an empirical study of the autobiographies of women activists in Turkey, this article is framed by the activist turn in memory studies, which has shifted scholarly attention away from victimhood, trauma and suffering towards social movements and memories of struggles. It considers a form of ‘activist victimhood’ as an identity under construction. The article shows how veteran female activists in Turkey navigate this category and transform it for strategic purposes. Memories of imprisonment and state-inflicted violence have legitimised women’s speaking out and have opened up a space for the circulation of women’s life stories. The article describes how activist women through autobiographies navigate the gendered positions historically attributed to them, adapting as well as challenging them.

This article examines the lexical memory work performed by the British New Left as it differentiated itself from the organised labour movement post-1956. It argues that activists use memory to reframe the meaning of keywords in the ‘protest lexicon’, and that this is an important, though usually implicit, activist cultural practice. Based on previous work in conceptual history and cognitive science, it begins by situating lexical memory work as an activity on the border between narrative historical memory, semantic memory and implicit collective memory. It then discusses the resignification of the word solidarity during the long 1960s, when lexical work was a key feature of the New Left’s apostasy from traditional Marxism. Finally, it examines the case of the British heterodox Marxist journal, Solidarity, outlining how it intervened in the protest lexicon by wrenching free the keyword solidarity from previous meanings, changing its historical referent and, ultimately, resignifying it.

This article discusses how the reproductive rights slogan ‘my body my choice’ – which functions as a carrier of feminist cultural memory – was weaponised when it gained traction in anti-vaccine movements that appropriated it. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, transnationally coordinated groups associated with the far right and characterised by nationalist and pro-life values started using the protest slogan to politicise their resistance to local lockdown restrictions and vaccine and mask mandates. The article shows that their use of the slogan was a hostile form of mnemonic appropriation and analyses the discursive mechanisms used to discredit the reproductive rights movement. It demonstrates that when slogans become carriers of cultural memory, they can be used in claim-making by movements on opposing sides of the political spectrum. It concludes that protest memories can be used politically both in the advancement of social movement causes as well as in the backlash against those causes.

This article investigates the mnemonic labour of LGBT+ activists and movements. It examines activists’ efforts to shape and mobilise memories for mnemonic, cultural and political change. The concept of the ‘memory-activism nexus’ is adopted as an analytical framework to unpack the relationship between memory in and of LGBT+ activism. This framework allows for a deeper understanding of the role of memory within the unique cultural orientation of LGBT+ movements. The article first offers an overview of the diverse approaches to mnemonic labour in the recent history of LGBT+ activism. Focusing on Argentina, the article then analyses the walk for Lesbian Visibility Day, organised in Buenos Aires by the activist collective Frente Docente Disidente in 2021. This case study shows how activists organise and sediment cultural memories for their later adaptation and (re)mobilisation.

This article revolves around a case study of the Matapacos statue intervention that took place during the 2019/2020 Chilean social uprising.¹ I examine how the introduction of a large statue of the riot dog Negro Matapacos into the urban space of the Chilean capital of Santiago disrupted the traditional monumental landscape by making visible a range of counter-hegemonic mnemonic narratives that converged and reinforced each other in a multidirectional dynamic. The statue intervention was part of a more extensive reconfiguration of the sensible in the urban space during the mobilisation, driven by the activists’ immense aesthetic output, which in turn fed into the emergence of the collective political subject of the Chilean mass movement. Although the statue intervention evoked memories of violent events, it was characterised by a joyful and celebratory atmosphere, which demonstrates the mobilising role of nontraumatic mnemonic practices in the context of activism.

This article studies the interrelations of memory work and activism in the Iranian context by focusing on the way remembering victims of state violence informs political activism. Due to constant repression, the recurrence of state violence and the criminalisation of oppositional activities and non-conforming lifestyles, the Iranian context is saturated with contentious memories that cannot be brought into public space. Oppositional memory work, especially regarding the victims of direct state violence, has thus become dangerous, counts as defiance and requires alternative spaces for taking shape. This article maps out and explains how activist memory work in this context entails carving out activist memoryscapes and intertwines personal suffering with acts of remembering the other and how memory is used as a resource in broader modes of oppositional politics, justice-seeking and endeavours towards social change. Examples of activist memory work in the Woman, Life, Freedom protests, a short documentary film and a commemorative exhibition are analysed in the article to showcase the different mnemonic dynamics at stake and to highlight the importance of mediation and cultural forms in the formation of activist memory work.

This article investigates the ways in which Dutch Extinction Rebellion activists discursively engage with the past, present and future on Instagram and leverage the platform’s affordances for mnemonic purposes. We argue that Extinction Rebellion activists, in their communication on the platform, connect these temporal planes retrospectively and prospectively. First, Extinction Rebellion activists use the past as a resource for present action aimed at producing lasting change. This relates to cultural reservoirs and repertoires of past injustices. Second, the present is perceived by Extinction Rebellion activists as a concern for future memory. The recording and documenting of climate injustices and the actions of the movement itself are examples of this. Both positive and negative imagined futures are used by Extinction Rebellion activists to legitimise and delegitimise past and present (in)action. In other words, Extinction Rebellion activists’ future imaginaries not just shape present action, but also shape their memory work. Instagram’s affordances of archivability, connectivity and spreadability are used by Extinction Rebellion to support their digital memory work. These socio-technical affordances are thus appropriated as mnemonic affordances for rhetorical and practical purposes. We support these claims through in-depth interviews with Extinction Rebellion activists and a thematic analysis of Instagram content shared by them.

Departing from personal memories of protests in London and Berlin, in this article I make space within the memory-activism nexus to consider how contemporary activists are remembered by that which they conventionally target: the state. To do this, I first recount existing understandings of that nexus and the position of the state therein. I then emphasise how states remember activists via police surveillance databases before discussing the digital activist traces held in such databases via the concept of mediated prospective memory. Thereafter, I empirically ground these conceptual contributions via a discussion of the surveillance databases used in the United Kingdom and Germany and the growing adoption of automated facial recognition technology in these countries. This discussion relies on the work of police monitoring groups whose activism contributes, alongside the various actions of the state and its agencies that I foreground, to the complexity of the memory-activism nexus.

This article explores the role of archives and archiving in the memory–activism nexus with reference to the various ‘movements of the squares’ that started in 2011. The Egyptian Uprising, 15M, Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Uprising and Nuit Debout each made concerted efforts to ensure their future remembrance by laying down an archive in which their actions and aspirations were ‘sedimented’. The article explores the crossover between the prospective and retrospective orientations of this activist memory work. It argues that there is an affinity between the affordances of archives as a mnemonic medium and the movements’ ‘politics of prefiguration’, both because the participatory character of the archiving is already an exercise in radical democracy and because an archive provides not a single narrative with a prescribed meaning but a resource for future meaning-making by others.

Is memory studies experiencing an activist turn? What discourses and practices surround such a pronouncement, and what forms of forgetting might such an assertion usher in? This commentary explores recent claim-making around memory studies’ activist turn and seeks to understand its provocations and critiques. It anchors these discourses within a wider constellation of scholar-activism, paying particular attention to citational politics and memory, activist forms of knowledge making, resource distribution, and the politics and precarities of the contemporary university system.