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.

Transcription is a key part of oral history practice. Transcribed text is often the main way in which a wider audience engages with an oral history interview, and even as the possibilities for digital and multimedia presentation become wider, text remains an important component of how interviews are received and understood. Drawing on examples from our research on memories of the Troubles in Ireland, we argue that oral historians need to think creatively and conceptually about the effects of transcription, particularly in terms of how complex narratives are received and understood. We offer some examples of how creative forms of transcription can shape engagement with these narratives and with ideas of composure, coherence and memory.

This study uses the Palestinian Oral History Archive to investigate how Palestinian refugees in Lebanon sustain a cohesive collective memory of the Nakba through shared narratives. Grounded in Halbwachs’ theory of collective memory, we employ statistical analysis of narrative pairwise similarities, examining the influence of shared gender and geography. We use textual representations and semantic embeddings to represent the interviews. Our analysis yields robust findings. Shared origin emerges as the primary driver of narrative similarity across thematic, factual, and semantic measures. This foundational connection is significantly amplified by a shared residence in Lebanon, with refugees sharing both origin and residence, exhibiting the highest narrative cohesion. Additionally, women’s narratives show greater thematic cohesion, particularly in recounting experiences of the British occupation, underscoring the gendered dimensions of memory formation. This research deepens understanding of collective memory in diasporic settings, emphasizing the critical role of oral histories in safeguarding Palestinian identity and resisting erasure.

The 1940s were a formative and divisive decade in modern Greek history, leaving enduring scars on society. This study explores the ethnic dimension of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) through the lens of conflicting collective memories and political identities in northern Greece’s Kastoria region. Drawing on oral history interviews conducted with local residents and secondary sources, it examines how two key ethnic groups in the area — the Dopii and the Pontians — developed divergent narratives of the 1940s. The analysis shows how wartime experiences and postwar persecution shaped each group’s memory of occupation and civil conflict, which in turn reinforced distinct ethnic identities and political affiliations. Over time, these narratives of victimhood and blame became central to group identity, although recent generational changes and new social realities began to soften the divisions. The findings underscore the dynamic interplay between memory, identity, and historical trauma in a multiethnic context, illustrating how the civil war’s legacy continues to shape local identities and intergroup relations, albeit with diminishing intensity over time.

In this article I suggest looking at memory as a symbolic field animated by the emotional tensions that emerge from popular interpretations of state hegemonic narratives. These affective engagements challenge the binary framings of memory as a contested project between the elite’s script and the resistance from below. Using the iconography of the Brazza Mausoleum, I argue that colonial memory in Congo acts as a spectral force through which the grievances from the colonial past convey meaning to the frustrations experienced through the postcolonial state. Colonial history returns as a phantom haunting the unfulfilled promises of the independent state.

This article examines the forgetting of the collective memory of the Filipina “comfort women” prior to the 1990s transnational redress movement. It argues that the prevailing social norms around prostitution, postwar narratives of heroism versus collaboration, and the interests of state and elite actors contributed to the initial silencing of this memory. However, shifts in societal norms towards sexual slavery and the return of democratic spaces in Asia enabled the later remembering and eventual mobilization of the “comfort women” memory which facilitated the emergence of the redress movement in the Philippines, challenging the state’s homogenized official memory of the Asia-Pacific War.

An examination of the relationship between constructs of individual and collective memory and the realities of exile cannot be fully possible without an exploration of the exile media coverage of the various groups of refugees in the different countries where they pursued integration into the majority society. This paper explores the migratory experiences of refugees from Czechoslovakia in the second half of the twentieth century. It reflects on the issue of migration and memory by means of research into media coverage of the large-scale migration wave of refugees from the communist dictatorship between 1948 and 1989. The text develops the theory of an alternative or surrogate public sphere, in a wider conceptualisation, which was created by refugees in the West. The paper works with the concept of ‘will to memory’, in the narrower theoretical framework, which is applied to the exile situation and which reveals the more general principles and narratives shaping the exile collective memory.

To explain why Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this article foregrounds a crucial but understudied dimension: national memory. It argues that both discontinuity in national memory and dislocation between national memory and territory threaten states’ ontological security. The Soviet collapse marked a profound break in Russia’s national memory. To restore the ontological security thus shattered, Russia’s ruling elite adopted a narrative of radical continuity of Russian statehood, linking Kievan Rus, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Romanov Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation into an unbroken thousand-year tradition. Yet by placing its origins in independent Ukraine, this narrative was inherently precarious. While mending the discontinuity in national memory, it produced a dislocation between memory and territory, rendering Russia ontologically vulnerable. By asserting their own claim to Kyiv as the birthplace of Ukrainian nation- and statehood, Ukraine’s ruling elite exposed this dislocation and laid bare both the precarity of the radical continuity narrative and Russia’s resulting ontological vulnerability. The Kremlin’s response was to seek political – and, when that failed, military – control over Ukraine to redress this dislocation and eliminate the sources of ontological vulnerability that flowed from the radical continuity narrative.

This study focuses on a unique Facebook group: ‘Cyprus Immigrants Organisation’, whose members are mostly refugees who were once held in camps in Cyprus in the late 1940s and their descendants. The study offers a content analysis of 687 posts and comments published by group members during 2022. It reveals how a Facebook group made possible, produced, and promoted narratives of a topic that receives relatively little attention in the literature, media, and other memory spaces. The study highlights the range of memory-related content and activities within a Facebook group. We found three main activities of memory work within the group: (a) Members try to shape a coherent narrative of the events; (b) Members discuss acts of remembrance, suggesting additional activities and sharing personal initiatives; (c) Members aim to emphasise their personal connection and belonging to the Cyprus exiles’ community by sharing photographs, artwork, and documents. These memory practices, alongside processes such as gathering knowledge, sharing memories, shaping narratives, and commemorating, highlight the uniqueness of a Facebook group as a platform for memory. These kinds of activities would not be possible on such a scale without the digital environment or, more specifically, a Facebook group. With numerous narratives and collaborative knowledge gathering, the group exemplifies a democratised process of multi-generational memory work and narrative construction.

This article examines the Italian translations and reception of Winston S. Churchill’s The Second World War, using British and Italian archival materials and press sources. It shows how the Italian editions and serialisations introduced constant modifications – abridgements, omissions, textual cuts, and paratextual framing – in order to adapt the memoirs for a national audience. These interventions softened Churchill’s judgments on Italy, emphasised the ideological character of the war, and strengthened anti-Soviet themes, thus aligning the text with dominant cultural and political discourses of the postwar years. Analysis of contemporary reviews and newspaper debates highlights a polarised reception: critical distance or silence in intellectual journals contrasted with enthusiastic praise in mainstream dailies, where the memoirs were hailed as both literary achievement and democratic statement. The article argues that these editorial and translational strategies played a crucial role in integrating Churchill’s narrative into Italian collective memory, supporting a symbolic redefinition of Italy’s place from defeated nation to one of the victors.

This article examines the construction of gendered collective identity among leftist women in Turkey through their post-1980 coup prison memory. By analyzing 124 autobiographical narratives, we uncover a process of identity formation grounded in a continuous negotiation between past struggles and present concerns, constituting a counternarrative that challenges the master narrative of defeat and submission prevalent after the coup. The article’s tripartite framework of distance, substance, and persistence underscores women’s journey from marginalization to collective empowerment, producing shifting subject positions across time. By placing temporality at the center of collective identity formation, this study contributes to feminist memory literature and identity studies while addressing a significant historiographical gap by bringing the neglected struggles of leftist women in Turkey to light.

How do institutionalized memories of historical trauma shape contemporary political attitudes? This study examines how emotionally evocative reminders of past violence influence public opinion. Drawing on a survey experiment in South Korea, I test how symbolic narratives of Japanese colonial repression affect emotional responses and downstream political views. The results show that while these reminders evoke strong emotions—especially anger and fear—they do not directly alter attitudes toward national identity or policy. Instead, anger, more than fear, consistently predicts both inclusive orientations, such as increased national pride, and exclusive preferences, including support for protectionist policies. These findings suggest that historical trauma influences political behavior not by providing new information but by activating internalized emotional frameworks. The study contributes to research on the legacy of political violence by identifying discrete emotions as key mechanisms linking collective victimhood to divergent political responses.

This article examines the Portuguese maritime epic through the discourses of gatekeepers, particularly members of the Portuguese parliament. The study positions the maritime epic as a crucial element of Portuguese identity and self-esteem, central to an ongoing culture war over the past and the contestation of official narratives. The analysis reveals that, while the maritime epic serves as a ‘lieu de mémoire’ for collective memory, it is increasingly contested by decolonial movements and actors. The findings indicate (i) a left–right polarisation and (ii) a more nuanced, depolarised stance among mainstream political actors, characterised by two distinct approaches: a voluntarist perspective, advocating for revising the narrative, and an antivoluntarist stance, expressing caution regarding the terms of the debate.