Presented as a ‘formal metacomic’ (Cook RT, 2017, Metacomics. In Bramlett F, Cook RT and Meskin A (eds), The Routledge Companion to Comics. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 257–266. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315851334-32) and understood through Gillian Whitlock’s ‘autographic’ (Whitlock G, 2006, Autographics: The seeing “i” of the comics. Modern Fiction Studies 52(4), 966. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0013), this article explores techniques such as abstraction and multiple narrative threads in autobiographical comics, highlighting their storytelling potential from a neurodivergent, ADHD perspective. It aims to advance comic creation as a research and sharing tool for diverse experiences, viewing autographics as a form of critical literacy through which art and activism intersect. The work emphasizes neurodivergent activism through the metaphor of abstraction, which both resists and invites narrative through sequencing. This aligns with the work of J Baetens (2011, Abstraction in comics. SubStance 40(1), 94–113. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2011.0004), who describes abstraction as anti-narrative. In this concept, a tension exists, since sequencing superimposes narrative onto abstract images, revealing multiple truths. This aligns with neurodivergent experiences, where various ways of perceiving co-exist. The work positions comics as a form of academic resistance and autoethnographic activism.

Podcasting as a mnemonic practice is a recent development, especially among historically disadvantaged groups such as refugees. This study argues that podcasting creates distinct memory ecologies that preserve and disseminate refugee memory. We critically examine two podcasts that engage with refugee memory from the Vietnamese and Cambodian diasporas in the United States of America – Vietnamese Boat People (VBP) and Before Me (BM) – to illustrate this argument. Drawing on methodological insights from netnography and podcast ethnography, the study does a qualitative content analysis of the podcasts’ websites and transcripts. Positioning ourselves as reflective listeners, we examine how VBP and BM promote the preservation of refugee memory and oral histories. The analysis finds that these podcasts bring familial refugee memory into public digital spaces through conversational memory-making, archive subaltern histories, and foster collaborative mnemonic participation. Our observations reveal that these podcasts offer conversational mnemonic capital for refugee generations and create spaces of mnemonic belonging. We conclude by arguing that podcasts should be recognised as an emerging medium of memory preservation.

Algorithmic technologies have started to transform the ways people experience everyday life and the ways they remember and store personal memories. More and more companies are converting our recorded data into automated memory experiences with machine learning algorithms. Promotional discourses go along with the release of these memory products. We argue that the study of these specific discourses provides insight into the imaginaries surrounding the datafication and automation of remembering. Rooted in the approaches of both memory and media studies, this study offers a qualitative, semiotic analysis of the promotional discourses of three companies (Google, Apple, and Personal AI) and one project (Memoro). The proposed comparison is not based on the functional part of the technology itself – as they are very heterogenous – but focuses on the discursive promises that are made in the promotional material.

This article tackles the construction of cultural memory in visual media through Jasmila Žbanić’s globally-awarded film Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020). Similar to previous attempts at memorialisation transcending to social media – such as the #ŠtoTeNema movement on X (Jaugaitė 2024, Memory, Mind & Media 3, 1–22) – Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) evinces the moral complexities faced by Aida, an English teacher credited as a translator for the United Nations (UN) Blue Helmets, as she grapples with her desire to save her family and neighbours, and her duty as an interpreter. Focusing on the daily trials of Srebrenica citizens before and after the 12 July massacre, Žbanić’s production succeeds as an alternative commemorative practice exhibiting the complexities encountered by Bosniak civilians (Mulaj, 2017, Crime, Law and Social Change 68, 123–143). Žbanić centres the victims’ perspective by casting Bosnian actors and placing a Bosniak female witness as the main character (Milišić, 2021, Društvene i humanističke studije 4, 207–224). Employing social justice frameworks (Misztal, 2003, Theories of Social Remembering, Open University Press), the film demands responsibility and acknowledgement of the international community’s failures in protecting civilians. Žbanić’s portrayal of the UN Blue Helmets, through Aida’s eyes, highlights how unrecognised accountability impedes victims’ identity reconstruction and shared cultural memory (Assmann, 2011, Communicative and Cultural Memory. In Knowledge and Space, Springer Netherlands, pp. 15–27). Through visual and contextual analysis, the film challenges the silencing and denial of Bosniak suffering, countering dominant discourses promoted by Serbian authorities. The article concludes by allegorising Aida’s narrative as a shared global experience for survivors of ethnic cleansing, raising awareness of the moral implications of war and displacement.

The more-than-human interview is a new arts-based research method inviting participants to recall and share memories of interactions with the natural world in conversation with a fictional nonhuman character. This approach is grounded in the concept of eco-entangled memory – memories shaped through emotional, temporal, and spatial entanglements between human and nonhuman beings. By giving the natural world an active role in storytelling through the nonhuman interviewer, the method aims to blur the human/nonhuman divide and foster multispecies awareness. This article investigates how narrative and artistic expression can surface eco-entangled memories in order to reconfigure more-than-human relations. It presents a case study with a Danish sustainability activist, whose interview is translated into a comic that functions both as a research output and an integral part of the inquiry. Comics, with their capacity for layered meaning, temporal fluidity, and emotional resonance, offer a unique medium for exploring posthuman perspectives and representing the more-than-human world. Findings suggest that the more-than-human interview, through visual storytelling, offers a reflective space to revisit and revive eco-entangled memories, facilitating ethical recall and strengthening relational engagement. While acknowledging the risks of idealisation of nature memories and human projection onto characters, the study shows that imaginative and playful nonhuman figures can open space for shifting narrative roles and inviting alternative ways of seeing. This article contributes to environmental storytelling, memory studies, and arts-based research by offering a replicable method for cultivating ecological imagination and relational thinking, using comics as a tool for climate communication and environmental activism.

This article develops the concept of Elicited Memory to explain how Holocaust discourse on social media shifts from persistent mnemonic undercurrents to heightened public salience during moments of crisis. Rather than treating Holocaust memory as either formally commemorative or diffusely embedded within everyday discourse, the article conceptualizes Elicited Memory as a crisis-driven mode of mediated remembrance in which historical analogies are activated as particularly prominent interpretive frameworks within networked media environments. The analysis draws on more than 9,000 Hebrew-language X posts collected during two major crises in Israel in 2023: the first 100 days of the judicial overhaul protests, and the first 100 days following the October 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing Gaza war. Using a mixed-methods approach organized around three dimensions – temporality, directionality, and vernacular articulation – the findings show that Holocaust references persist as a continuous mnemonic undercurrent within Israeli social media discourse while intensifying sharply during moments of political conflict and collective trauma. These intensifications emerge through interactions between elite interventions and networked circulation, alongside shifts from relatively flexible and often ironic Holocaust analogies during the protest period to narrower and more emotionally charged invocations during the war period. The findings suggest that existing distinctions between commemorative and non-commemorative memory do not fully explain how Holocaust discourse operates within networked crises. Instead, Holocaust memory functions as a dynamic interpretive resource through which political conflict, collective trauma, and moral uncertainty are publicly negotiated within digital media environments.

On August 10, 1991, the cargo ship Vlora arrived in Bari, Italy, carrying around 20,000 Albanians fleeing political instability. This event marked a turning point in Italy’s migration history and is often seen as the moment the country began to perceive itself as a land of immigration. This article examines how recent graphic novels revisit and reframe the legacy of the Albanian migrant landings through visual storytelling, specifically focusing on Jepi Jora (Croma, Jepi Jora, Edizioni il Galeone, 2021) and L’invasione degli extraterroni (Hysi and Rapa, L’invasione degli Extraterroni. Un’autobiografia contro ogni confine, Becco Giallo, 2023). These works, produced within Southern Italian underground and activist networks, offer countermemories that challenge dominant national narratives of race, migration, and identity. Through critical visual and discourse analysis, combined with semi-structured interviews with artists and activists, this study investigates how these comics contribute to a renewed cultural memory of the Albanian crisis. It explores their role in resisting far-right political discourses and in shaping anti-racist activism, particularly in Southern Italy – a region increasingly positioned as a symbolic border of Europe. Drawing on postcolonial and intersectional frameworks, the article also engages with the racialisation of Southern Italians and migrants, notably through Hysi’s concept of the ‘extraterrone’, a hybrid identity confronting internal and external forms of exclusion. By situating these comics within broader debates in memory, migration, and transnational Italian studies, the article argues for the significance of graphic narratives as tools of political critique and historical reclamation into the contested imaginaries of Italian nationhood.

This reflective essay interrogates the complex interplay between identity, memory and migration through personal narrative, historical analysis and cultural representation. It draws on the intersections of my own personal experiences with the academic research I have conducted, interrogating anew the concepts of memory, identity and collective ideas of belonging as manifested by the documents we are entitled to carry. Using the Netflix series Transatlantic as an entry point, it explores how identity documents – passports, permits and bureaucratic records – shape individual experiences and collective histories, particularly in contexts of displacement and state surveillance. I connect these depictions to my own migratory background, highlighting the privileges of dual citizenship and the inequalities embedded in what Schahar termed the ‘birthright lottery’. Drawing on archival research into Irish and British travel permit systems during the Second World War, the piece situates historical identity regimes within contemporary debates on datafication, statelessness and the governance of migration. It further reflects on the development of the History of Identity Documentation in European Nations (HIDDEN) research network (funded by Cooperation in Science and Technology [COST], CA21120), which examines the past, present and future of identity documentation. Ultimately, the essay argues for critical engagement with how identity is constructed, contested and experienced across time.

Rather than treating popular feature films as predictions of technological futures, this article approaches them as widely circulating cultural texts through which ideas about AI, authority, violence, memory, and evidence become available for public interpretation. It analyses films that place artificial intelligence (AI) in war, violent conflict, or post-conflict recovery, asking how such films shape what counts as memory and evidence in imagined futures. Using an IMDb search, we build a high-visibility corpus and select a balanced core sample of ten films with explicit rules on conflict salience, franchise concentration, and diversity. We code each title for: future configuration and normative closure, AI’s dominant role in conflict (belligerent agent, infrastructure, mediator, or victim), anticipatory mood and control imaginaries, and the memory practices foregrounded (archives and logs, biometrics, testimony, simulation, erasure, and mind upload). Most films depict dystopian futures, yet they often extend present-day security and platform arrangements rather than invent wholly new orders. Across the sample, AI most often appears as infrastructure, and control is repeatedly framed as control of the record: who can collect, authenticate, edit, and replay logs, surveillance feeds, biometrics, and synthetic reconstructions. These narrative choices reshape evidence, accountability, and the imagined conditions of repair after violence. Endings commonly restore governability through selective visibility and strategic silence, narrowing what must be publicly acknowledged. We argue that AI–conflict cinema links anticipation to struggles over proof, making certain forms of exceptional rule and post-conflict settlement feel plausible.

As a history of ideas and casuistry of concepts, the article has modest goals: (1) I argue that anxiety is both ‘sensation’ and ‘emotion’. (2) I discuss this distinction, observing that, while useful intra-culturally, it can lead to confusion because both emotions and sensations are conditioned by historic and cultural factors (I compare Indian, Chinese, and Greek tables of affects). (3) I thereupon address the question of how societies define (and deal with) anxiety, starting from a discussion of a recent New York Times article, as well as of a recent study in political anxiety. (4) This provides a transition to the question of anxiety in unstructured crowds, including political movements. Using social psychology, I urge that the study of crowds needs to be brought into the 21st century (Stephen Reicher), given their capacity for self-organization. (5) A refined sense of crowd dynamics may diminish our reasons for fearing anxiety, in groups notably, just as channelling group anxiety through communication may contribute to positive social change.

Rick Derderian is the host of the podcast Realms of Memory. Tasked with understanding ‘how countries address their darkest chapters’, the podcast has grown to be a space where academics, campaigners, and heritage practitioners discuss how their work engages with ideas of collective memory and trauma. In an interview touching on the various case studies and themes addressed in the podcast, Derderian provides his thoughts on how memory has become an increasingly central part of political debates and how new conceptual approaches to memory studies have shaped his own ideas about the role of the past in the present.

Italian media often use stereotypical images and metaphors to report narratives on migration. This shadows the complexity and the single stories of refugees who arrive in the country. This article analyses how an Italian current affairs TV programme, titled Il cavallo e la torre (The Knight and the Rook), reported the tense negotiations between the newly elected Italian government led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and three NGO ships saving refugees at sea. In the arc of 7 days between October and November 2022, the programme narrated the installation of Meloni’s right-wing government. At the same time, the show exposed the government’s refusal to allow three NGO ships with numerous shipwrecked refugees on board to dock safely in one of Italy’s harbours. Drawing on memory studies and narrative theory, I analyse two episodes of the programme, and I show how the TV programme defies the migration tropes that both the media and the newly elected Italian government employ. It does so by using multiperspectivity and the externalization of individual memories of migration, as theorized by Aleida Assmann. Moreover, it makes use of the ability of narrative journalism to communicate information and create immersion for the audience, which Marie Vanoost calls the informative and immersive dimensions of narrative journalism. In this way, the programme offers a different and more nuanced perspective on Italy that can positively affect cultural memory on migration.

British Cold War government bunkers were built to preserve state authority after a nuclear attack, but the catastrophe they anticipated never occurred. This article argues that they are infrastructures of suspended crisis: material systems organised around an event that did not arrive and therefore shaped by a temporality of the not yet. Drawing on Derrida’s hauntology, it reads the bunker as a site where an expected disaster remains active as a ghost, continuing to organise present perception and interpretation. These sites do not store memory of an actual catastrophe. Rather, they preserve the afterlife of institutional rehearsal, including plans, routines, and spatial arrangements designed for an imagined aftermath. Bringing futures studies into dialogue with memory studies, the article shows how bunkers can hold latent cultural memory and trauma-like orientations without an originating disaster. The argument is based on fieldwork at Kelvedon Hatch and Barnton Quarry, supported by 3D LiDAR scanning, point cloud processing, and visualisation. The resulting uncertainty images are treated not as neutral records or scientific revelation, but as practice-led critical media. Their continuity, occlusion, instability, partial viewpoints, and micro-temporality of capture register gaps in knowledge and the atmosphere of anticipatory governance. At a moment of renewed nuclear anxiety and resilience planning, Cold War bunkers return again as templates for imagining future crisis in public culture today. The article shows how collective future thinking can be organised around what never happened, and offers a practice-based method for demonstrating how unrealised threats still act in the present.

Journalists are mnemonically dispossessed in the age of large language models. To accept News Corp CEO Robert Thomson’s 2026 redefinition of journalism as an ‘input’ alongside semiconductors and datacentres is to deny the human provenance of what it means to make and to consume news. Licensing deals now being signed between major press groups and AI companies enact a transfer of mnemonic sovereignty from journalists as human ‘agents of memory’ (Zelizer, 2008) to the algorithm, to the machine. Generative AI produces an intention economy, restructuring how information flows through society, with each interaction with AI deepening its understanding not just of what you know, but of what you do not yet know to ask (Fang, 2025). This gives AI systems functional agency, anticipating the curiosities it wants us to formulate, generating a ‘past that never existed’. We are at a tipping point in the battle over journalism’s soul in AI’s seizure of human agency in the making of memory, and in how the production of news becomes infrastructure food. Journalists are caught up in the production of content used to feed AI models and systems, which will shape what people are trying to know, rather than their value being derived from the work of journalists as human agents of memory, of having created a past that they have a stake in. We set out how the battle for journalism’s soul is not yet lost in the emergence of a new memorial front of ‘archival journalism’, institutional glitches, and infrastructural exits.

This article offers a new way to think about objects of memory, focusing on how a single item can take on various roles – from a cherished personal keepsake through a commercial product to a powerful political symbol. By examining the ‘Bring Them Home’ dog tags created in response to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, the article explores how these dog tags emerged as expressions of empathy for the hostages and their families, then evolved into a powerful symbol of the current historic moment, and eventually came to reflect diverse political positions on the conflict and even on broader human rights issues. Drawing from media reports, interviews, and visual evidence, the article highlights how these dog tags were worn during local protests, featured in international discussions, dominated the Israeli public space, and were integrated into everyday life, serving as a compact representation of both political identity and protest.

This article examines Russian national future thinking during the war in Ukraine. It views future thinking as a form of mediated action that is dependent on narrative tools and explores the structure and function of various types of narratives that play a role, including schematic narrative templates and national narrative projects. The first section of the article goes into conceptual issues on plot, the sense of an ending and other features of narrative logic that assign meaning to events. The second part of the article goes into how these issues play a role in shaping Russian ideas about the war in Ukraine. Using sources such as Russian social media, we examine how the narratives used by Putin and widely accepted by the broader population have changed over the course of the war in Ukraine. After initially focusing on denazification and other issues specific to Ukraine, the Russian narrative has moved on to more established and general themes about existential threats from military threats and alien ideas from the West. To recognize what has changed and what has not, we harness the notion of a national narrative project, which is an underlying code in the form of a national autobiography for Russia. The sense of an ending for this national narrative template has religious overtones and a telos about redemption that follows suffering. It is narrative with a sense of an ending in the future, which means using it has the future and future thinking built into it.

This article examines how WhatsApp functions as a space where people shape collective memory and challenge dominant sociopolitical narratives. Focusing on Nigeria’s Obidient movement, a youth-led campaign that supported Peter Obi in the 2023 presidential election, this article seeks to understand how everyday online interactions on WhatsApp produced alternative ways of remembering and forgetting. In other words, this articles asks, How did members of an unofficial Obidient WhatsApp group enact counter-memory practices regarding Nigeria’s 2023 general elections? To answer this question, this study deployed the ethnographic approach and drew from Foucault’s concept of counter-memory and assemblage theory to understand how memory, technology, and social interaction converged in dynamic ways. The results indicate that members of the WhatsApp group construct and circulate alternative narratives that challenge mainstream sociopolitical accounts. These results are discussed in two central themes: ‘Counter-memory and the construction of alternative narrative’ and ‘WhatsApp as a mnemonic community and assemblage’. Through practices of circulating first-hand experiences and lived testimonies, evidence of electoral misconducts, and memories of past elections and protests, members collectively produced what the author described as a ‘mnemonic community’, a space where memory is created, negotiated, and sustained through interaction. However, these practices are not independent but are shaped by the interconnectedness of human (members of the group) and non-human (WhatsApp, smartphones, or multimedia content) factors. Overall, this article argues that messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, significantly shape how people remember and interpret sociopolitical movements and participation.

This article adopts an integrated practice-led and practice-based methodology, framed through an essayistic approach to comics-based research, using our own artistic practices, one from Serbia and one from India, as case studies. Through works addressing the fall of democratic values, memories of conflicts, rise of nationalism, and ecological devastation, we examine how urgency shapes creation, reflection, and the mediation of memory in comics-making. Rather than a reactionary impulse, we conceptualize urgency as a relational and iterative condition that unfolds through political-ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions, and one that structures how artists act, think, and draw in response to crises. In our practices, drawing functions as both an act of remembering and a form of thinking: essayistic comics-making materializes a dialogue between immediacy and reflection, as well as between lived experience and its critical rearticulation. We argue that through this interplay, comics-making becomes a mode of situated knowledge production, where memory, testimony, and critique are interwoven. The essayistic form enables urgency to be inhabited rather than merely depicted, turning the creative process itself into a reflective space of resistance and inquiry. By tracing how these dynamics operate within specific socio-political contexts, this paper expands the understanding of comics-making as a medium of embodied memory and a method of research that translates lived urgency into thought and form.