Memory is a communicative affair. Media and the forms of interaction and sensemaking they enable shape the ways people come to connect to a collective past, store personal reminiscences, and return to bygone moments. As such, every new wave of information and communication technology has brought about shifts in mnemonic culture. The practices and processes of media remembering and communicative commemoration receive an increasing academic attention across disciplines. Our conference addresses this nascent area of inquiry. It calls for contributions that explore the fundaments of communication memory studies in different academic traditions, map corresponding fields of research, and scrutinize analytical perspectives. The event brings together theoretical and empirical approaches toward the capacity of communication processes and media environments for memory making. Due to the variety of paradigms, we believe that it is necessary to work across disciplines and embrace an international perspective.The conference is open to research related to questions of memory, media, and communication. And it invites senior as well as emerging scholars to contemplate the future of communication memory studies.
Keynote speakers: Karina Horsti (Finnish Academy & University of Jyväskylä), Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow), Carolyn Kitch (Temple University), Randi Marselis (Roskilde University), & Anna Reading (King’s College London). The conference took place at the University of Salzburg in June/July 2022.Christine Lohmeier and I organized this event together with our colleagues in the Memory and Media Network; it was funded by the German Research Foundation, Memory and Media Network Grant. More here