Reconstructing Memory


Book Description

Reconstructing Memory explores the relationship between photography and memory. Do photographs really improve the memory of people and events or are we constructing false memories in response to the images we look at? The following images are of the memory.




Reconstructing Memory


Book Description

The book aims to reconstruct and analyze the disputes over the Polish-Jewish past and memory in public debates in Poland between 1985 and 2012. The analysis includes the course and dynamics of the debates and, most importantly, the panorama of opinions revealed in the process.




Reconstructing Minds and Landscapes


Book Description

Mental and material reconstruction was an ongoing process after World War II, and it still is. This volume combines a detailed treatment of post-war cultural reconstruction in Finnish Lapland – a region on the geographical and historical margins of its nation-state – with comparative case studies of silent post-war memory from other European countries The contributors shed light on key aspects of cultural reconstruction generally: disruptions of national narratives, difficulties of post-war cultural demobilisation, sites of memory, visual narratives of post-war reconstruction, and manifestations of trans-generational experiences of cultural reconstruction. Exploration of the less conspicuous aspects of mental reconstruction reveals various forms of post-war silence and silencing which have halted or hindered different groups of people in their mental return to peace. Rather than focusing on the “executive level” of material reconstruction, the volume turns its gaze towards those who experienced the return to peace in the mental, societal, and historical margins: members of ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities, women, and children. The chapters draw on archival and other original sources, personal memories, autobiographical interpretations, and academic debate. The volume is relevant for scholars and advanced students in the fields of cultural history, art history, and cultural studies.




Our Faithfulness to the Past


Book Description

This volume brings together essays -- three of them previously unpublished -- on the epistemology, ethics, and politics of memory by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell. The essays in Part I diagnose contemporary skepticism about personal memory, and develop an account of good remembering that is better suited to contemporary (reconstructive) theories of memory. Campbell argues that being faithful to the past requires both accuracy and integrity, and is both an epistemic and an ethical achievement. The essays in Part II focus on the activities and practices through which we explore and negotiate the shared significance of our different recollections of the past, and the importance of sharing memory for constituting our identities. Views about self, identity, relation, and responsibility (all influenced by traditions in feminist philosophy) are examined through the lens of Campbell's relational conception of memory. She argues that remaining faithful to our past sometimes requires us to re-negotiate the boundaries between ourselves and the collectives to which we belong. In Part III, Campbell uses her relational theory of memory to address the challenges of sharing memory and renewing selves in contexts that are fractured by moral and political difference, especially those arising from a history of injustice and oppression. She engages in detail Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where survivor memories have the potential to illuminate the significance of the past for a shared future. The study of memory brings together philosophers, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, legal theorists, and political theorists and activists. Sue Campbell demonstrates a singular ability to put these many different areas of scholarship and activism into fruitful conversation with each other while also adding an original and powerful voice to the discussion.




Memory Distortion


Book Description

In Memory Distortion, contributions from a multidisciplinary team of eminent scholars form the basis of an exploration of a range of phenomena including: hypnosis, confabulation, source amnesia, flashbulb memories and repression.




Settler Memory


Book Description

Faint traces of Indigenous people and their histories abound in American media, memory, and myths. Indigeneity often remains absent or invisible, however, especially in contemporary political and intellectual discourse about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racism in general. In this ambitious new book, Kevin Bruyneel confronts the chronic displacement of Indigeneity in the politics and discourse around race in American political theory and culture, arguing that the ongoing influence of settler-colonialism has undermined efforts to understand Indigenous politics while also hindering conversation around race itself. By reexamining major episodes, texts, writers, and memories of the political past from the seventeenth century to the present, Bruyneel reveals the power of settler memory at work in the persistent disavowal of Indigeneity. He also shows how Indigenous and Black intellectuals have understood ties between racism and white settler memory, even as the settler dimensions of whiteness are frequently erased in our discourse about race, whether in conflicts over Indian mascotry or the white nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism. Envisioning a new political future, Bruyneel challenges readers to refuse settler memory and consider a third reconstruction that can meaningfully link antiracism and anticolonialism.




Reconstructing the Cognitive World


Book Description

An argument for a non-Cartesian philosophical foundation for cognitive science that combines elements of Heideggerian phenomenology, a dynamical systems approach to cognition, and insights from artificial intelligence-related robotics.




(Re)Constructing Memory: Education, Identity, and Conflict


Book Description

How do schools protect young people and call on the youngest citizens to respond to violent conflict and division operating outside, and sometimes within, school walls? What kinds of curricular representations of conflict contribute to the construction of national identity, and what kinds of encounters challenge presumed boundaries between us and them? Through contemporary and historical case studies—drawn from Cambodia, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Peru, and Rwanda, among others—this collection explores how societies experiencing armed conflict and its aftermath imagine education as a space for forging collective identity, peace and stability, and national citizenship. In some contexts, the erasure of conflict and the homogenization of difference are central to shaping national identities and attitudes. In other cases, collective memory of conflict functions as a central organizing frame through which citizenship and national identity are (re)constructed, with embedded messages about who belongs and how social belonging is achieved. The essays in this volume illuminate varied and complex inter-relationships between education, conflict, and national identity, while accounting for ways in which policymakers, teachers, youth, and community members replicate, resist, and transform conflict through everyday interactions in educational spaces.




Reconstructing Cultural Memory


Book Description

Comment les littératures du monde entier ont elles, chacune à sa façon ou s'inspirant mutuellement, vécu, assumé, rejeté les modèles culturels, artistiques et linguistiques, que de force ou de gré elles ont été amenées à accueillir au long des siècles? Comment les traductions, vecteurs premiers des relations interlittéraires, ont elles joué de leurs immenses ressources pour dissimuler, encourager ou décourager la constante et périlleuse mise en cause des traditions nationales?Les quatorze contributions de ce volume nous offrent un éventail de réponses à ces deux questions. De la France au Japon, de la Chine aux Etats-Unis, du Brésil à la Pologne, nous voyons se déployer les multiples stratégies médiatrices de la traduction, toutes révélatrices des tensions qui traversent les cultures où elle prend naissance, que ces tensions soient de nature culturelle, langagière ou littéraire.Ni simples transferts linguistiques, ni fenêtres transparentes sur l'Ailleurs, ni discours désincarnés sur l'Autre, les traductions relèvent plus exactement d'un processus complexe de communication, auquel prennent également part tant les traducteurs que leurs lecteurs: vivant et agissant au coeur des littératures adoptives, ils en investissent aussi bien les grands genres que la paralittérature, ils en infléchissent, souvent de concert, les valeurs et les modes d'écrire, et en démontent, pour mieux les exhiber, les rouages intimes.




Reconstructing Spain


Book Description

This book explores the role of cultural heritage in post-conflict reconstruction, whether as a motor for the prolongation of violence or as a resource for building reconciliation. The research was driven by two main goals: to understand the post-conflict reconstruction process and to identify how this process evolves in the medium term and the impact it has on society. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and its subsequent phases of reconstruction provides the primary material for this exploration. In pursuit of the first goal, the book centers on the material practices and rhetorical strategies developed around cultural heritage in post-civil war Spain and the victorious Franco regime's reconstruction. The analysis captures a discursively complex set of practices that made up the reconstruction and in which a variety of Spanish heritage sites were claimed, rebuilt or restored, and represented - as signs of historical narratives, political legitimacy, and group identity. The reconstruction of the town of Gernika is a particularly emblematic instance of destruction and a significant symbol within the Basque regions of Spain, as well as internationally. By examining Gernika, it is possible to identify some of the trends common to the reconstruction as a whole, along with those aspects that pertain to its singular symbolic resonance. In order to achieve the second goal, the book examines the processes of selection, value change, and exclusionary dynamics of reconstruction. Exploring the possible impact of post-civil war reconstruction in the medium term is conducted in two time frames: the period of political transition that followed General Franco's death in 1975, and the 2004-2008 period when Rodriguez Zapatero's government undertook initiatives to 'recover the historic memory' of the war and dictatorship. Finally, the observations made of the Spanish reconstruction are analyzed in terms of how they might reveal general trends in post-conflict reconstruction processes in relation to cultural heritage. These insights are pertinent to the situations in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan, and Iraq.