Michael Pickering

Emily Keightley

This book shows how the mnemonic imagination creatively uses the resources of photography and music in the registering and management of change. Looking in particular at major transitions and turning points, it covers key issues of identity for the remembering subject and key scales of remembering in vernacular milieus. The book explores the connections of memory and remembering with transformations in intimate relationships, migration and spatial mobilities, loss and bereavement involving loved ones or those with whom close affinities are felt, resulting in a volume that helps fill the gap in memory studies caused by lack of sustained ethnographic work. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on the processes and practices of remembering in everyday life, it demonstrates how the mnemonic imagination is central to the management of change and transition, and how its cross-temporal interanimations of past, present and future are fostered and facilitated by the visual and sonic resources of photography and recorded music.

Repossessing the Past

Memory and the Management of Change

This book explores how photography and recorded music act as vehicles or catalysts in processes of remembering, and how they are regarded, treated, valued and drawn upon as resources connecting past and present in everyday life. It does so via two key concepts: vernacular memory and the mnemonic imagination.

Pieces of the Past in Everyday Life

Photography, Music and Memory

The two most salient technologies of remembering in everyday life are photography and recorded music. Photography, Music and Memory is a refreshing ethnographic study in which Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley explore how they act as vehicles or catalysts of memory. The book applies the concept of the mnemonic imagination, developed in their previous book, to the uses of these complementary technologies, showing how they contribute to distinct yet interrelated stages in the distillation of experience. In-depth comparative studies of visual and sonic media are rare. Pickering and Keightley make amends for this in a rich, detailed study of how these particular media inform and support our individual and collective understandings of the past. They draw on the extensive fieldwork they have conducted, and discuss the various ways in which the mnemonic resources associated with photography and recorded music are integral to vernacular memory, enhancing the multiple narratives we construct in our everyday social worlds.

The first textbook on research methods and methodological questions in the field This guide provides students and researchers with a clear set of outlines and discussions of particular methods of research in memory studies. It offers not only expert appraisals of a range of techniques, approaches and perspectives, but also focuses on key questions of methodology in order to help bring unity and coherence to this new field of study. Key Features: Investigating community remembering and memory in personal narratives Exploring the localisation of official national memory, and the contribution of different memoryscapes and different regimes of memory to cultural heritage Attending to painful pasts and disrupted memory Examining how memory is achieved and communicated in everyday interaction, and how it is manifested in emergent ethnicities Focusing on the production of social memory in the media and the use of media as self-produced vehicles of memory Analysing the dynamics of remembering in public confessions and apologias, and in testimonies offered by Holocaust survivors

Research Methods for Memory Studies

Samuel Merrill

Priska Daphi

This collected volume is the first to study the interface between contemporary social movements, cultural memory and digital media. Establishing the digital memory work practices of social movements as an important area of research, it reveals how activists use digital media to lay claim to, circulate and curate cultural memories. Interdisciplinary in scope, its contributors address mobilizations of mediated remembrance in the USA, Germany, Sweden, Italy, India, Argentina, the UK and Russia.

Emily Keightley

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