Liza PottsSenior Researcher, WIDE ResearchAssistant Professor of Digital Humanitieshttp://www.lizapotts.orglpotts@msu.edu@LizaPotts

Spaces of/as Participatory Memory

Participatory Memory Project

When Participatory Culture alters the conversation in Collective Memory

Studying Public Memory-Making Physical and Digital Spaces Celebrations and Mourning

Shifts in visibility, agency, and

effort Hierarchies and Networks Officials and Participants

Extending Collective Memory

“In a sense, the act of bearing witness made a community out of all those who witnessed the atrocities, regardless of their reasons for being there.”- Barbie Zelizer in Remembering to Forget: The Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. 1998, p. 134.

From Traditional Museums

Who Decides What We Remember?

Memorials are “a species of pedagogy” that “seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in doing so, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth recovering.”

- Charles Griswold in “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Malll” in Critical Inquiry, Summer 1986, p. 689.

To Participatory Action

Across Time / Space

“We are resistant towards something and we participate in something.”

- Henry Jenkins in “Textual Poachers, Twenty Years Later: A Conversation between Henry Jenkins and Suzanne Scott” from the Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture Updated 20th Anniversary Edition, Routledge 2013, p. xxii

How Participation Shifts the Questions We Ask

Investigating Participatory Spaces

…Ways of Writing Memory

…of Celebration

…and of mourning

Participatory Memory of Princess Di

Project Goals:

• Investigate public spaces of memory, celebration, and reflection

• Learn about how these spaces communicate experience for participants

• Consider how we might digitize, curate, and enhance these experiences

Contested Memory-Making

“Public commemoration is a form of history-making, yet, it can also be a contested form of remembrance in which cultural memories slide through and into each other, merging and then disengaging in a narrative triangle”- Marita Sturken in “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” from the Visual Cultural Reader, Ed. Mirzoeff, Routledge 1998.

Memory and Identity

“Memory – relating past and present – is thus the central faculty of being in time, through which we define individual and collective selves”

- Jeffrey K. Olic, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy in “Introduction” from the Collective Memory Reader, Oxford 2011.

Storymaking as Participation

“It is only through narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that operate through time”

- H. Porter Abbott in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative 2002.

Archiving Participation

“It follows that if considerable precautions are to be taken to assure the identity of a culture’s symbolic material, it will be advisable to direct those precautions to ensuring the identity of its ritual.”- Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember, Cambridge1989/2011.

Considering Participatory Memory

Thank You

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Contact Lizahttp://www.lizapotts.org/Email: lpotts@msu.edu Twitter: @LizaPotts