Anna Reading

King's College London | KCL · Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries

How do we understand the relationship between memory and place in the context of Extended Reality (XR) migration museum exhibitions? The study combines a global mapping of XR within migration museums, a user analysis of Cologne’s virtual migration museum, and practice-led research with the UK Migration Museum to argue that XR places in Web 2.0 cons...

This study explores how memory forms may be understood through an economic lens tracing how the labour of remembering adds value to and (trans)forms memories. The study focuses on embodied memories and imaginaries of migration and belonging and the ways in which these are (trans)formed through mobile and social media witnessing into a collective li...

This afterword asks why it is that the social within social movement studies, cultural memory studies and digital media studies tends to dominate and occupy a place of conceptual centrality and significance that remains opaque. To problematise this, I develop a sense of what I term the antisocial memory assemblage, suggesting the need to surface th...

This chapter provides a critical overview of the memory of gender, and the gendering of memory in war museums internationally. it examines questions of representation, production, and audiences in the museum context.

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual...

From Transitional to Transformative Justice - edited by Paul Gready February 2019

Cambridge Core - Human Rights - From Transitional to Transformative Justice - edited by Paul Gready

While research has addressed the ways in which autism is represented in popular culture, in literature and in film, this article points to how autistic cultural assemblages afforded by the unevenly global-digital or globital age act to queer neurotypical communication and media ethics more broadly. The article argues that evidence points to the eme...

As our ownership of digital media devices and our use of online services increase, so too our digital memories amass and our need for digital memory storage expands. This chapter asks: what do digital-global memory economies include, how do they work, who pays the cost of their expansion, and who benefits most? To understand the political economy o...

This chapter compares digital memories of the human body and birth gained through obstetric sonography with early 20th-century accounts of pregnancy and childbirth. It examines the particular transformations to human memory through the practice of sharing digital memories of the foetus on mobile and social media. The chapter traces the mnemonic pra...

This chapter develops the analytical framework for a new gendered epistemology of memory in the Globital Age. It models memory in the Globital Age as an assemblage mobilised and (de)securitised by memory agents within an uneven field of struggle that is articulated through the body, in everyday practices, and through states and transnational organi...

The chapter examines the long genealogy of feminist work both in theory and through feminist activism concerned with the impact of technologies on gender and memory. It then discusses how gender and memory technologies are understood within the field of memory studies to suggest that this area is one which is less studied in relation to how the dig...

This chapter examines how the journalistic record as a form of gendered cultural memory is changing through the use of mobile and social technologies to witness violence and death in the War on Terror. It gives new feminist interpretations to questions of gender and memory in the public domain in relation to mobile phone witnessing of acts of viole...

Panel-Rationale: The panel explores the role of memory work in current political conflicts, protest movements, and social unrest that become increasingly conducted and communicated through connective and ubiquitous media. It contributes to the conference's overall theme and the section's focus area on Social Media, Activism and Social Change by ass...

This chapter addresses how mobile and social technologies in the domain of the home and everyday life are transforming women’s memories of parenting and family life. It draws on two original empirical studies carried out in London in 2009 and 2015 conducted with samples of digitally born women and digitally migrant women. The studies are compared w...

This chapter argues that the work of women intellectuals is repeatedly forgotten and erased because both men and women fail to actively mobilise and securitise the memories of women’s research, as well as feminist artistic and activist work. This chapter thus consciously traces the genealogy of Reading’s concept of globital memory, critically captu...

This chapter develops the idea of the ‘feminist mnemonic imagination’ as a critical tool to dis-embed the knowledge practices of the mnemologist in the Globital Age. The chapter examines human imaginaries of gender and memory at significant historical points in which revolutionary mnemonic technologies were invented. Anna Reading shows the entangle...

This chapter examines feminist activism and archiving within the globital memory field, arguing that digital memory is now a crucial part of feminist resistance to inequalities within patriarchal societies. It examines a project by Fuel Theatre in 2013–2015 called Phenomenal People, which mobilises new memories of women from around the world, inclu...

This book asks how 21st century technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones and social media are transforming human memory and its relationship to gender. Each epoch brings with it new media technologies that have transformed human memory. Anna Reading examines the ways in which globalised digital cultures are changing the gender of memory and...

The Introduction outlines the rationale and scope of Gender and Memory in the Globital Age, with an overview of its analytical framework which combines conventional methods with those that emphasise movement and trajectory. The Introduction details a number of new terms: the first neologism is ‘mnemologist’, which Reading defines as the scholar who...

The cloud is a metaphor that helps to obscure the material realities that rest beneath our digital memories. However, a number of scholars in memory studies have suggested that cultural memory has always had a material basis and some, though limited, scholarly attention has already considered the toxic by-products and unethical practices involved i...

In 2012 in western Sydney, Australia, I met up with a group of heritage activists to carry out a ‘docuprotest’ at a derelict site in Parramatta that is Australia’s oldest continuous site of institutional female containment. Ivy covered the windows and the perimeter wall. A noisy colony of fruit bats nested in the eucalyptus trees. Rusted padlocks p...

I am singing as I write this. For more than 30 years songs from Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK have been an important part of my personal memories of nonviolent political struggle. In this chapter I examine the articulations of my personal memories of Greenham Common Women’s Camp within and through the wider cultural and digital memor...

This article intervenes into research on cultural and digital memory by arguing for the significance of the materiality of memory and its underlying political economy. Although cultural and digital memories are characterized as contested, multiple and often involving interplay and conflict between different power dynamics, what remains missing is a...

In this article we introduce the themed issue 'Mediated Mobilities'. We begin by articulating some of the potential relationships between media and mobility critically addressing the key conceptual distinctions that underpin them and the methodological demands placed on media studies when exploring the complex ways in which mobility is embedded in...

News of the shooting by US security forces of the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, was broken via the micro-blogging site, Twitter. The event was significant in terms of marking a watershed in the intersecting practices of mobile and social media with journalism, with the Bin Laden story ‘marking a new reference point’ in media coverage (Fillou...

The dynamics of digitization and globalization are synergetically and dialectically changing the ways in which human beings individually and collectively capture, document, share and preserve memories of the past. This paper develops further the concept of the 'globital memory field' with a discursive overview of the development of 'digital memory'...

This book aims to provide a context in which a clear link can be traced between the politics of memory and its manifold representations and misrepresentations in public media towards a viable politics of justice. The assumption is that public awareness and perceptions of injustice, whether they are political, economic or social, depend on the mass...

The traditional playground game of generations of children ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ anticipates a metaphor for time that is neither teleological nor digitally networked, but expressed dynamically in terms of folding. If it is Two O’clock, Three O’clock, Four O’clock or any other O’clock, the players may creep towards the big bad Wolf, who has he...

In the heartland of Europe there has been a critical amnesia: a ‘blind spot in the consciousness of Europe’ (Grass, 2011, p. 25). European politics of justice is unsettled by the disarticulated memory of slavery. This is not the memory of the transatlantic slave trade of African people, about which books have been written, films made, and exhibitio...

Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is ‘right to memory’: the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions. This article outlines the rationale for...

Most cultural theorists argue that time in the digital and globalized media era is accelerating, with the future and past collapsed into an extended present. This would seem to be the case with the 2005 London bombings: mobile witnessing through the use of mobile camera phones provided co-present personal communicative memory of the events by survi...

Neda Agha Soltan, a young Iranian woman, was shot dead on June 22, 2009 on the streets of Tehran during protests following the Iranian June elections. Her death was digitally witnessed by a friend nearby using a camera phone: the data then went viral. He emailed the data to another friend in the Netherlands. The camera phone video was uploaded to a...

Some of the first images rapidly circulated globally in news media of the London Bombings on 7 July 2005 were taken by non-journalists using mobile camera phones. This paper explores some of the ethical issues raised by mobile phone witnessing in the 'war on terror'. The article uses a performative approach to witnessing in which mobile testimony i...

In the science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time, first published in 1976, Marge Piercy envisaged a future society in which the characters would have ‘kenners’, mobile communication and personal memory prosthetics strapped to the wrist and connected to a world wide electronic network. In March 2006, Piercy’s kenner, in effect, became a realit...

This article suggests that the study of memory in the 21st century needs to be understood within a rapidly developing techno-social context that includes wearable and portable mobile technologies. Drawing on a pilot study involving depth interviews on camera phone use by women and men in London in 2006, the paper addresses how mobile camera phones...

Historical events and social memories are increasingly articulated and accessed through the means of interactive digital technologies. Particularly in the context of history museums, interactive digital media kiosks and web-sites are used to enhance and in some cases constitute a key way in which the past is conveyed to the public. Yet in what ways...

Perhaps it is no accident that the word ‘usher’ — which nowadays we associate with the person who shows us our seats in the cinema — has its etymological roots in the phrase ‘the keeper of the door to the bones’.1 Though the practice of gathering in the darkness of the tomb of our ancestors around their bones to listen to genealogies is less common...

When Holocaust survivor Vera Laska was liberated at the end of the Second World War, she had a concern that women were already perceived as marginal to the Holocaust: she subsequently decided that it would be up to survivors like her to ensure women’s experiences were included within the historical record (Laska, 1983). This chapter explores the ro...

The Holocaust ended in 1945, but subsequent generations have inherited memories of the atrocities through a range of intersecting and contradictory cultural practices and mediations that include historical sources, autobiographies by survivors, films, memorial sites and museums. These mediations, as we have seen in the previous chapters, hand down...

When the young artist, Charlotte Salomon, handed over to a friend more than 700 illustrations of her childhood family experiences during Nazi policies with the words ‘Keep this safe: It is my whole life’ (Salomon cited in Felstiner, 1997:ix) she was signalling that neither her life nor her memories were safe from annihilation and obliteration. Char...

There is now more than half a century of writing about the Holocaust, of which life-writing forms a substantial part, from Primo Levi’s If This is a Man originally published in 1947 (2000) to the memoirs of the children of survivors such as Anne Karpf’s The War After (1996). There are people’s diaries written during the events themselves, as well a...

Whereas ‘the spectacle of the new’ was what attracted people in the nineteenth century, now we flock to exhibitions about the past (Samuels, 1994). Museums play an important role in the creation of ‘public’ memory, acting as the locus for a power struggle between the State, the people and, increasingly, corporate capital over what historical storie...

Cultural and media policies were a key part of the mechanisms of atrocity in the Holocaust. This article looks at the context and implications of some of these policies and argues that, while racism and ethnic exclusion are fundamental to our understanding of the Holocaust and primary to the way in which cultural policies were formulated and used,...

John Downing, Internationalizing Media Theory: Transitions, Power, Culture, London: Sage, 1996, £14.99 paperback, xviii+268 pp. (ISBN: 8-39-8711-0). Ali Mohammadi (ed.), International Communication and Globalization, London: Sage, 1997, £14.99 paperback, xviii+228 pp. (ISBN: 0-7619-55542). - - Volume 33 Issue 1 - Anna Reading

Avec la chute du communisme, l'etude des anciens etats satellites se centre sur leur evolution sociale, mais aussi sur la nature de leur systeme mediatique. A travers l'etude de la television des quatre pays du groupe Visegrad (Pologne, Hongrie, Republique tcheque et Slovaquie), le but de l'A. est de comprendre les changements effectues depuis 1989...

When we are children we have childish notions: we view the world in primary colours. When we are bigger we have biggish notions: our view of the world may become mixed up. I was seven when Suzie my best friend told me of an iron curtain. ‘It stretches right round the whole world,’ Suzie said, ‘and there’s a war that’s cold because the curtain block...

Solidarity is sexist in its policies, its structure and its ideology and fails to represent women’s needs. Yet despite this, as I shall show, working women have their own modes of participation and representation in Solidarity as a union and a party.

There are no women’s publishing houses, no women’s centres, no women’s studies departments and feminism is still a dirty word. Yet there are those women who for over a decade have actively embraced the term feminism and who now openly organize, gather and challenge the sexual division of society head on. There are twenty to thirty groups working in...

Sociological research provides a more objective picture of the situation of women under state capitalism. Research stresses the role of government policies and ideology in bringing women into the paid work force, the sexual division of labour, the double burden of work and family, the attitudes of men and women, and the differences between rural an...

A language may be an adhesive force binding a nation together: it may also seal and bind women’s lips. A language is a whole body of words and the method of communication used by a nation, people or race. It may include other methods of expressing thoughts, feelings or wants, such as sign language or body language, as Shakespeare aptly noted, ‘Ther...

In Western propaganda the Eastern bloc was portrayed as other or different from the West: the West was capitalist and women were fulfilled, and the Fast was communist where women sadly lacked. The ruling force after World War Two in the new People’s Poland was indeed a communist party — the Polish United Worker’s Party (PUWP), which based the new c...

Gazing from the outside in Part I it seemed that women could not represent themselves, speak for themselves. They were firmly tied within the apron strings of history, left on the threshold of language, fossilized within the monumental distortions of state capitalism, muffled by the Solidarity flag.

Much work has been done on stereotypical representations of women in Western literature from Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1968) to Lesley Ferris’ Acting Women: Images of Women in the Theatre (1990). In this chapter I examine some of the stereotypes of women in Polish literature and the effects of nationalism and state censorship on writer-women.

Polish women lack, according to the reading of Part I from outside the static border or granica. They lack an identity or meaning of their own. They are vessels, appendages of PUWP, of Solidarity, of the Church, of Nationalism, of the economic system, of men. Polish women as such are present but not really present at all. They are excluded from the...

The windowless room is huge and throbs with the roar of hundreds of looms shuttling back and forth. The air is thick with fluff and dust as we’re guided between the machines. In a tiny smoke filled hole on rickety wooden benches nine women sit. They’re taking their five-minute break. The sludge-coloured walls and ceiling shake as we try to talk. On...

The women’s movement after World War Two did not simply vanish with a wave of the magic wand of PUWP; women continued to kick, though more gently, against barriers new and old which threatened to confine them.

With no natural boundaries, except for the Carpathian mountains to the south, Poland has continually struggled for identity and recognition as an independent nation state.

Polish women queue for meat and accept Christ’s flesh-bread on silent tongues. Bending over backwards for children and men they give a shift-work cough and bend again. With broom bent backs, backs over brooms, women sweep overground, underground, conference Solidarność, state-party rooms.

In most Polish literature women are holes to be filled in by men: in the poetry of Anna Swir women are whole by themselves. Swir’s work, which bridges the interwar and state capitalist periods, provides one example of how some Polish writer-women, despite the limitations of censorship, challenged dominant sexual stereotypes and forged new connectio...

To totally re-encapsulate, now, the voices of these women would be like trying to coin the sun. I could abridge it all, finish everything off with definite conclusions, but, it would be dishonest, it would be betrayal.

In Britain to successfully arrange to speak with a real government minister requires the tenacity of a non-specific virus. Even if you do manage to endure the fifty-seventh rendition of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ whilst being left on hold for two days and then manage to repeat your enquiry for the fifty-eighth time to yet another department, there are...

Feminism in Poland is not a Western import, a modem transplant of Western ideas. It is the result of the growing engagement by Polish women to change their own situation. Women may well adapt certain ideas from abroad to meet their own particular needs, but feminism is largely home-grown.

Across a woman’s breasts rests a gun with ‘Sex and Gun Shop’ in bloodied letters; this is the sign in the centre of Lódź. Jolanta Litwinowicz and I follow the arrow, step inside the shop and browse; we look first at the giant blow up dolls; next a plastic saddle with a lurid green and orange penis; then a row of breasts; followed by multi-coloured...

‘Students are like entrails,’ one student remarked, ‘and the Polish education system like a sausage machine. We’re filled up with lots of cereals and very little meat.’ At the English Department of the University in Lódź, at which I taught in 1988/9, the majority of students are women, many of whom go on to teach in local secondary schools. The bui...

Solidarity is mutual dependence, the holding together between people, a community of interests. Solidarity is a woman in a back-alley, paying to be stripped, nailed to a broom-handle crucifix.

How are the forces of globalisation and digitisation reconfiguring the philosophy of communication in relation to memory? To what extent does this require the development of a new epistemology of memory? I argue that the combination of digitisation and globalisation suggest a grounds for knowledge that conceptualises these co-extensive dynamics in...