Books by Joanne Garde-Hansen
A collection of essays that examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink establi... more A collection of essays that examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink established conceptualisations of human memory in terms of its discourses, forms and practices.
Contents:
Introduction
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet takes stock of where we are emotionally with re... more Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet takes stock of where we are emotionally with regards to the Internet in social and cultural terms. Online users are switching between personal, national, international and global modes of being and feeling that shape private and public experiences. Drawing upon the well-established discipline of media studies, the book travels theoretically through, across, in and between examples of traditional media as they merge and emerge online.
The book explores how we feel about and how we feel in our online media ecology in the context of global media platforms. Part One Theoretical Approaches draws together for the first time theories of emotion, affect, feeling and public sentiment as they weave their way from traditional to online media. Part Two: Close Readings offers three key ways in which we engage with online media content: in the search for happiness and connection, in representing our changing environment, and in engagements with the female body. The authors provide a compelling argument for exploring the continua of traditional media forms, practices, ideologies and audiences that are recreated in online worlds.
Geography and Memory creates a new space of study by assembling international scholars and emergi... more Geography and Memory creates a new space of study by assembling international scholars and emerging talent for the first coherent and co-ordinated approach to explorations of identity, place and becoming. In focusing upon these three dynamics the editors have organised the relationship between geography and memory into an accessible framework for approaching key aspects of memory, remembering, archives, commemoration and forgetting in modern societies. The contributors are drawn from a range of local, national and international contexts, including the UK, Germany, USA, Malaysia and Australia. The book uniquely opens up the disciplines of geography (human, political, cultural and physical) into a dialogue with other disciplines such as media, the arts, heritage, psychology, psychotherapy, politics, sociology and cognitive science so as to present a wide-ranging and nuanced approach to memory studies.
Media are acts of memory. They offer representations of memorable events, tools for remembering a... more Media are acts of memory. They offer representations of memorable events, tools for remembering and forgetting, technologies for archiving, contributing to cultural amnesia as well as memorial mania and nostalgia. This book explores the complex and multiple ways that media converge upon our desire to evoke the past in the present. It examines the use of media as the external mechanisms we come to rely upon for remembering. This is particularly important when considering the production of the past through digital media to the making and ‘making up’ of history by film and television. As audiences wrest control of memory-making practices from institutions and corporations in ways that challenge our dominant understandings of the past, it is timely to fully understand the issues at stake when media and memory come together. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the connections and disconnections in the study of media and memory. Its key features:
• Explores discourses, forms and practices of media and memory with active learning exercises that engage readers
• A thorough and detailed overview of key writers, theories and debates
• Covers a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media: from radio, television, film, photography, digital media, mobile phones and popular music
• Case studies offer innovative approaches and methods that enrich the text
The book is designed to be used as a primary text on courses within media, communication, culture, history and heritage studies and is ideal for a module focusing on media and memory research. Although it is primarily aimed at an undergraduate reader it offers new methodological approaches in the case studies that will be useful to postgraduates.
What is digital memory? How are digital technologies changing what we remember and how? Records o... more What is digital memory? How are digital technologies changing what we remember and how? Records of the past used to be expensive and bulky to keep, and difficult to access. But digital media technologies provide cheap data storage and easy data retrieval, with mobile networks enabling unprecedented global accessibility and participation in the creation of memories. Save As… Digital Memories brings together leading international scholars to address on-line memorials, blogging, mobile phones, social networking sites and the digital archive. They focus on topical subjects such the 'war on terror', cyberpunk, the Holocaust, digital remixing and the virtual museum. Trans-disciplinary and original, the book will appeal to those interested in how digital media technologies shape human memory. Providing an accessible and bold introduction to the subject of digital memory, each essay shows how digital technologies are changing human memory discourses, practices and forms, as well as the way we conceptualise memory itself.
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Talks by Joanne Garde-Hansen
Drawing from the books Save As…Digital Memories (2009), Media and Memory (2011), and Emotion Onli... more Drawing from the books Save As…Digital Memories (2009), Media and Memory (2011), and Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet (2013) this presentation will explore the term memory as it pertains to media discourses, forms, practices, industries and technologies. The theorisation of memory in terms of media and modes of transmission will necessitate a broad understanding of cultural and personal heritage, popular culture and fandom, collective and historical representations. The paper will draw upon a number of key examples to support the theoretical ideas, for example YouTube. The remembering of the researcher as a person with a body, memories and feelings who explores others’ bodies, memories and feelings with, through and about media is critical to any methodological approach. The paper will present the mixed methodologies I have used as well as a call to research digital memory culture as a sustainable concept. That is, if researchers are to explore mediated memory in their projects, then what underlying economies of memory is their research forgetting?
Drawing upon the key example of Kony 2012, this paper interrogates those online mediations that a... more Drawing upon the key example of Kony 2012, this paper interrogates those online mediations that ask us to pay attention and spread emotion. The online campaign video Kony 2012 emerged and was watched over 100 million times and received more than 400,000 comments on YouTube alone (see Heather McIntosh’s blog [2012] ‘KONY2012: Analyzing the Viral Documentary Video [online]). It created emotional noise both horizontally (across email, blogs, social networks and online video sites) and vertically (through journalism, television programmes, print media and radio). Not only was it an emotive online resource it also generated networked activity: people liked Invisible Children (the activist organisation that produced the video) on Facebook; celebrities blogged and tweeted about the campaign, millions ordered a ‘Kony 2012’ pack and wore the bracelets. With a slicker soundtrack than the amateurism of the video I Will Survive Auschwitz (2010) and more serious than Cebu prison inmates’ version of Thriller (2007), it ‘appeared’ to have broken the 1% rule.
The emotional noise created horizontally and vertically around Kony 2012 was mobilised by interlinked factors: the agents of emotion were asking us to pay attention through the spreadability of mixed media. This spreadability suggested that affect is what ought to/should/could bind individuals to each other and to their (mediated) environment. Yet, in this paper we argue that Kony 2012 demonstrates not so much the spreadability of media and emotion but the inability to spread the intended emotion and its production of mass disaffection among non-fans of Invisible Children. The paper draws upon our recent book Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet published by Palgrave Macmillan in early 2013.
This Public Lecture was given in Sao Paulo, Brazil at the request of Museu da Pessoa, Votorantim,... more This Public Lecture was given in Sao Paulo, Brazil at the request of Museu da Pessoa, Votorantim, Aberje and the University of Sao Paulo. It covered the growing concerns over the relationship between corporate and personal memory in a more open, digital culture and society. It began with a critical consideration of the 'crisis of memory' permeating the BBC in late 2012, as news of the Savile scandal had travelled to Brazil. It used this for thinking about how media organizations are being challenged to consider an ethics of care and compassion (drawing on Prof Roger Steare's 'ethicability' concept). It then considered crises of corporate memory in the context of media creativity and archives, with reference to theories of forgetting (Connerton 2008). I was able to present three examples of UK projects that sought to engage citizens and communities in media production and archive work.
This paper draws upon research interviews with senior staff at the BBC's Information and Archives... more This paper draws upon research interviews with senior staff at the BBC's Information and Archives to understand how discourses of metadata and assets are re-thinking how television is talked about in the industry.
"On the 18th January 2009, an online pop music fan posted over 50 outtake images from Madonna’s p... more "On the 18th January 2009, an online pop music fan posted over 50 outtake images from Madonna’s photographic shoot for her previously released Hard Candy album. These photos produced a backlash of abuse of the then 50 year-old Madonna from music fans and can be situated in a wider online discursive sphere of brutal and offensive critique of Madonna’s ageing body in social networking sites. While longevity, experience and wisdom ensure that Madonna continues to be meaningful to nostalgic and new audiences alike, these attributes slide out of view as the focus remains upon her body, its femininity and its ability to ‘pass’ in a youth-centred popular music culture.
In the wider context of understanding Madonna as a heritage industry that is being built upon fan nostalgia (The Madonna Picture Project), fan memory (fansites) and time-fighting media technologies (airbrushing for magazine shoots), the online trolling of Madonna’s image destabilises industrial efforts to maintain her regal status in pop history. Our paper offers a theoretical analysis of the online discursive (textual and visual) poaching and re-poaching of Madonna’s ageing femininity.
"
This symposium brings together a range of parties. Arts and media academics and practitioners res... more This symposium brings together a range of parties. Arts and media academics and practitioners researching GRT communities and representations; social/media entrepreneurs and educators; those working in arts, media and heritage sectors with GRT communities; and GRT community members interested in media, memory, archives and heritage. The Symposium will consist of presentations from speakers exploring arts, media and heritage projects related to UK and European GRT communities. The themes will cover archives, media and memory, mobility and media, social networking and family history, personal, collective memory and historical representation.
This symposium brings together a range of parties. Arts and media academics and practitioners res... more This symposium brings together a range of parties. Arts and media academics and practitioners researching GRT communities and representations; social/media entrepreneurs and educators; those working in arts, media and heritage sectors with GRT communities; and GRT community members interested in media, memory, archives and heritage. The Symposium will consist of presentations from speakers exploring arts, media and heritage projects related to UK and European GRT communities. The themes will cover archives, media and memory, mobility and media, social networking and family history, personal, collective memory and historical representation.
Drawing upon Annette Kuhn’s personal memory work and analysis of her family photograph album (200... more Drawing upon Annette Kuhn’s personal memory work and analysis of her family photograph album (2002) and Anna Reading’s recently articulated concept of ‘memobilia’ (Garde-Hansen et al 2009), this chapter examines the re-emergence of the photograph as a shared, networked and thus connected reflection of everyday life. No longer laid out in a hard copy album, the family photograph exists in the memory cards of mobile camera phones, in online digital vaults, shared on Flickr, published in blogs and tagged in Facebook. Soon, the generation that takes family photographs and lovingly sticks them in an album will be gone. Yet, what are the consequences for the family photograph that has endured and re-emerged as a shareable, wearable phenomenon and what of the vanishing practice and experience of sifting through shoeboxes?
While we are delightedly suffering from Derrida’s ‘archive fever’ (1998), one should not assume t... more While we are delightedly suffering from Derrida’s ‘archive fever’ (1998), one should not assume that it is the official archives that can, once converged with digital media, tell us what we need to know about the past. Moving old ideas in new ways may only serve to produce power, which ‘functions to make the eruption of the event part of the fabric of the known’ (Grosz, 1999, 16). The problem for archives is that memory can appear incongruent to them. Archiving memories – visually, orally, textually – is like smoothing out eruptions in order to regulate what can and should be known.
However, digital media gives to memory the opportunity for petit histoires to become histoires croisées where cultural transfer is embraced by networked, mobile and shareable media. Here researchers and communities can come together in cultural exchange. Drawing upon the concept of ‘digital memories’ (Garde-Hansen et al 2009), this paper applies media, memory and archive research to a very specific community-focused problem. How to represent the memories and archives of resilient individuals who have sustained a Jewish identity and community in a Christian English county and whose personal archive commences and is commanded in a well-researched period of danger?
The Cheltenham Hebrew Community commissioned a project to allow elderly members, some of them Kindertransport refugees (1939-1940), to reconstruct their arrivals and settlements in Gloucestershire. Their visual and oral histories of being displaced persons brought to a secure place may seem minor and insignificant. Their memories are good ones and they speak to a notion of migration culture that that functions as identity affirmation rather than exclusion.
Synagogue Lane (2008-2009) is a DVD of filmed oral histories and digital stories documenting the accounts of eight elderly Jewish residents of Cheltenham and the surrounding areas. Images of artefacts were converged with recorded interviews: items such as prayer shawls, family photographs, transit documentation, newspaper clippings and passports. The DVD will be showcased as part of The Festival of Jewish Culture 29th March 2009 (Cheltenham).
The project is a co-funded collaboration between media theorists, practitioners, undergraduates and community members. We will argue that a mediated concept of memory allows for knowledge exchange between academic investigators and communities in need of collective memory so as to provide flexible, shareable, mobile and sustainable archives.
1. Emotion and Affect
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
2nd July 2008
Times: 10.... more 1. Emotion and Affect
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
2nd July 2008
Times: 10.30-3.30
Josephine Dolan (UWE, UK); Colette Duke, (Sussex, UK); Frances Eames, (Nottingham, UK); Abigail Gardner, (Gloucestershire, UK); Joanne Garde-Hansen, (Gloucestershire, UK); Kristyn Gorton, (York, UK); Julia Hallam (Liverpool, UK) Claire Jenkins (Warwick, UK); Ros Jennings, (Gloucestershire, UK); Ruth Kelham (Gloucestershire, UK), Susan Knabe (Western Ontario, Canada); Eva Krainitzski (Gloucestershire, UK); Sherryl Wilson (UWE, UK).
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Books by Joanne Garde-Hansen
Contents:
Introduction
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The book explores how we feel about and how we feel in our online media ecology in the context of global media platforms. Part One Theoretical Approaches draws together for the first time theories of emotion, affect, feeling and public sentiment as they weave their way from traditional to online media. Part Two: Close Readings offers three key ways in which we engage with online media content: in the search for happiness and connection, in representing our changing environment, and in engagements with the female body. The authors provide a compelling argument for exploring the continua of traditional media forms, practices, ideologies and audiences that are recreated in online worlds.
• Explores discourses, forms and practices of media and memory with active learning exercises that engage readers
• A thorough and detailed overview of key writers, theories and debates
• Covers a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media: from radio, television, film, photography, digital media, mobile phones and popular music
• Case studies offer innovative approaches and methods that enrich the text
The book is designed to be used as a primary text on courses within media, communication, culture, history and heritage studies and is ideal for a module focusing on media and memory research. Although it is primarily aimed at an undergraduate reader it offers new methodological approaches in the case studies that will be useful to postgraduates.
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Talks by Joanne Garde-Hansen
The emotional noise created horizontally and vertically around Kony 2012 was mobilised by interlinked factors: the agents of emotion were asking us to pay attention through the spreadability of mixed media. This spreadability suggested that affect is what ought to/should/could bind individuals to each other and to their (mediated) environment. Yet, in this paper we argue that Kony 2012 demonstrates not so much the spreadability of media and emotion but the inability to spread the intended emotion and its production of mass disaffection among non-fans of Invisible Children. The paper draws upon our recent book Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet published by Palgrave Macmillan in early 2013.
In the wider context of understanding Madonna as a heritage industry that is being built upon fan nostalgia (The Madonna Picture Project), fan memory (fansites) and time-fighting media technologies (airbrushing for magazine shoots), the online trolling of Madonna’s image destabilises industrial efforts to maintain her regal status in pop history. Our paper offers a theoretical analysis of the online discursive (textual and visual) poaching and re-poaching of Madonna’s ageing femininity.
"
However, digital media gives to memory the opportunity for petit histoires to become histoires croisées where cultural transfer is embraced by networked, mobile and shareable media. Here researchers and communities can come together in cultural exchange. Drawing upon the concept of ‘digital memories’ (Garde-Hansen et al 2009), this paper applies media, memory and archive research to a very specific community-focused problem. How to represent the memories and archives of resilient individuals who have sustained a Jewish identity and community in a Christian English county and whose personal archive commences and is commanded in a well-researched period of danger?
The Cheltenham Hebrew Community commissioned a project to allow elderly members, some of them Kindertransport refugees (1939-1940), to reconstruct their arrivals and settlements in Gloucestershire. Their visual and oral histories of being displaced persons brought to a secure place may seem minor and insignificant. Their memories are good ones and they speak to a notion of migration culture that that functions as identity affirmation rather than exclusion.
Synagogue Lane (2008-2009) is a DVD of filmed oral histories and digital stories documenting the accounts of eight elderly Jewish residents of Cheltenham and the surrounding areas. Images of artefacts were converged with recorded interviews: items such as prayer shawls, family photographs, transit documentation, newspaper clippings and passports. The DVD will be showcased as part of The Festival of Jewish Culture 29th March 2009 (Cheltenham).
The project is a co-funded collaboration between media theorists, practitioners, undergraduates and community members. We will argue that a mediated concept of memory allows for knowledge exchange between academic investigators and communities in need of collective memory so as to provide flexible, shareable, mobile and sustainable archives.
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
2nd July 2008
Times: 10.30-3.30
Josephine Dolan (UWE, UK); Colette Duke, (Sussex, UK); Frances Eames, (Nottingham, UK); Abigail Gardner, (Gloucestershire, UK); Joanne Garde-Hansen, (Gloucestershire, UK); Kristyn Gorton, (York, UK); Julia Hallam (Liverpool, UK) Claire Jenkins (Warwick, UK); Ros Jennings, (Gloucestershire, UK); Ruth Kelham (Gloucestershire, UK), Susan Knabe (Western Ontario, Canada); Eva Krainitzski (Gloucestershire, UK); Sherryl Wilson (UWE, UK).
Contents:
Introduction
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
The book explores how we feel about and how we feel in our online media ecology in the context of global media platforms. Part One Theoretical Approaches draws together for the first time theories of emotion, affect, feeling and public sentiment as they weave their way from traditional to online media. Part Two: Close Readings offers three key ways in which we engage with online media content: in the search for happiness and connection, in representing our changing environment, and in engagements with the female body. The authors provide a compelling argument for exploring the continua of traditional media forms, practices, ideologies and audiences that are recreated in online worlds.
• Explores discourses, forms and practices of media and memory with active learning exercises that engage readers
• A thorough and detailed overview of key writers, theories and debates
• Covers a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media: from radio, television, film, photography, digital media, mobile phones and popular music
• Case studies offer innovative approaches and methods that enrich the text
The book is designed to be used as a primary text on courses within media, communication, culture, history and heritage studies and is ideal for a module focusing on media and memory research. Although it is primarily aimed at an undergraduate reader it offers new methodological approaches in the case studies that will be useful to postgraduates.
PART I: DIGITAL MEMORY DISCOURSES
The Mediatization of Memory; A.Hoskins
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing; P.L.Arthur
Rewind, Remix, Rewrite: Digital and Virtual Memory in Cyberpunk Cinema; S.E.Matrix
PART II: DIGITAL MEMORY FORMS
Memobilia: The Mobile Phone and the Emergence of Wearable Memories; A.Reading
Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families Reconnect in Cyberspace; A.Jakubowicz
Archiving the Gaze: Relation-Images, Adaptation and Digital Mnemotechnologies; B.Lessard
PART III: DIGITAL MEMORY PRACTICES
MyMemories?: Personal Digital Archive Fever and Facebook; J.Garde-Hansen
The Online Brazilian Museu da Pessoa; M.Clarke
Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory; J.Kidd
Remixing Memory in Digital Media; S.Wilson
The emotional noise created horizontally and vertically around Kony 2012 was mobilised by interlinked factors: the agents of emotion were asking us to pay attention through the spreadability of mixed media. This spreadability suggested that affect is what ought to/should/could bind individuals to each other and to their (mediated) environment. Yet, in this paper we argue that Kony 2012 demonstrates not so much the spreadability of media and emotion but the inability to spread the intended emotion and its production of mass disaffection among non-fans of Invisible Children. The paper draws upon our recent book Emotion Online: Theorizing Affect on the Internet published by Palgrave Macmillan in early 2013.
In the wider context of understanding Madonna as a heritage industry that is being built upon fan nostalgia (The Madonna Picture Project), fan memory (fansites) and time-fighting media technologies (airbrushing for magazine shoots), the online trolling of Madonna’s image destabilises industrial efforts to maintain her regal status in pop history. Our paper offers a theoretical analysis of the online discursive (textual and visual) poaching and re-poaching of Madonna’s ageing femininity.
"
However, digital media gives to memory the opportunity for petit histoires to become histoires croisées where cultural transfer is embraced by networked, mobile and shareable media. Here researchers and communities can come together in cultural exchange. Drawing upon the concept of ‘digital memories’ (Garde-Hansen et al 2009), this paper applies media, memory and archive research to a very specific community-focused problem. How to represent the memories and archives of resilient individuals who have sustained a Jewish identity and community in a Christian English county and whose personal archive commences and is commanded in a well-researched period of danger?
The Cheltenham Hebrew Community commissioned a project to allow elderly members, some of them Kindertransport refugees (1939-1940), to reconstruct their arrivals and settlements in Gloucestershire. Their visual and oral histories of being displaced persons brought to a secure place may seem minor and insignificant. Their memories are good ones and they speak to a notion of migration culture that that functions as identity affirmation rather than exclusion.
Synagogue Lane (2008-2009) is a DVD of filmed oral histories and digital stories documenting the accounts of eight elderly Jewish residents of Cheltenham and the surrounding areas. Images of artefacts were converged with recorded interviews: items such as prayer shawls, family photographs, transit documentation, newspaper clippings and passports. The DVD will be showcased as part of The Festival of Jewish Culture 29th March 2009 (Cheltenham).
The project is a co-funded collaboration between media theorists, practitioners, undergraduates and community members. We will argue that a mediated concept of memory allows for knowledge exchange between academic investigators and communities in need of collective memory so as to provide flexible, shareable, mobile and sustainable archives.
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
2nd July 2008
Times: 10.30-3.30
Josephine Dolan (UWE, UK); Colette Duke, (Sussex, UK); Frances Eames, (Nottingham, UK); Abigail Gardner, (Gloucestershire, UK); Joanne Garde-Hansen, (Gloucestershire, UK); Kristyn Gorton, (York, UK); Julia Hallam (Liverpool, UK) Claire Jenkins (Warwick, UK); Ros Jennings, (Gloucestershire, UK); Ruth Kelham (Gloucestershire, UK), Susan Knabe (Western Ontario, Canada); Eva Krainitzski (Gloucestershire, UK); Sherryl Wilson (UWE, UK).
However, Shildrick’s theory privileges a textual approach and there is a need to critique media texts in terms of biology and affect, through reference to audience response. How and why does a young female audience reveal affective states when faced with the monstrous otherness of the decrepit female body?
Gibbs (2002) has posited that affect offers a new approach to media representation, one that allows the biological body (effaced from the scene of youthful feminist criticism and cultural constructionist theories of the body) to re-enter. Thus, Gunther von Hagen’s performative pathology wheels the human body, alive and dead, onto the televisual stage, and marks it out not simply as deterministic but as offering problems, possibilities and perspectives. In turn, the audience is affected.
If as Angel and Gibbs (2006) have argued media remediate the human body through a pervasive over coding of human faces (and the face is all we ever normally see of elderly women). How, then, is the affect of anxiety evoked by the fearful sight of the aged female body that interrupts a ‘sweet old lady’s face’.