Overview
The Research Centre of Media, Memory and Community is developing cross disciplinary expertise with projects that centre upon the discourses, forms, practices and dynamics of memory in a media ecology. At its heart, it aims to deploy its research and practice for addressing issues of ‘learning’, ‘sustainability’, ‘public engagement’ and the ‘resilience’ of communities: local, regional, national, international, global, mobile, online, placed and displaced. A mediated concept of memory allows for an engagement with flexible, shareable, connectionist, rooted and sustainable archives, memories and narratives that offer rich and nuanced understandings of communities’ histories. Future-proofing such communities and individuals within communities requires collaboration and partnerships.
Mediated Memories
The Centre understands media in its broadest sense: writing, painting and illustration are as much technologies of memory as film cameras, radio and the Internet. The Centre takes as its starting point that the concept of ‘mediated memories’ (van Dijck, 2007) is an inclusive paradigm that opens memory studies up to interdisciplinary approaches. Indeed, memory itself is a form of mediation between individual and society. The centre encourages boundary crossing.
Memory Studies
The concept of memory has recently become a significant research area in the UK. The launch of the Centre for Memory Studies at Warwick University in 2008, alongside the Sage Journal Memory Studies, and the establishment of memory.net at London South Bank University demonstrate this is a growth area. In line with the university’s mission the Research Centre of Media, Memory and Community applies its research and expertise in ways that are meaningful and have impact in terms of public engagement: from the learning communities we serve to the local communities we face to the academic communities our research contributes to.
Initial Partnerships
Partnerships and collaborations are key to researching memory in a mediated world: not only within the Faculty of Media, Art and Communications, and across the University and South West region, but also with UK partners. The following internal and external partners have been involved in recent projects/proposals with members of the centre:
- Centre of Floods and Communities and CCRI, UoG
- Real Ideas Organization (Creative Partnerships)
- Lakers Secondary School, Voices in the Forest, Dean Heritage Centre, Royal Forest of Dean College, Gloucestershire
- The Centre for Memory Studies, Warwick University
- Media and Culture Research Group, London South Bank University
- Cultural Policy and Management, City University, London
- Department of Art and Cultural Studies and the Institute for Media, Recognition, and Communication, Department of Film and Media Studies, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Department for the Study of Religions, Södertörn University, Sweden
- Tema Q (Cultural Studies), Department for Studies of Social Change and Culture, Linköping University, Sweden
- School of Creative Media at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Sustainability
The Centre has a particular interest in exploring how its activities have social, cultural and economic impact for communities. While it is fully cognizant of the global reach and connectivity of media it is also mindful of the social and cultural welfare of the communities it engages with. Intergenerational communication and learning from the past, fundamental to sustainability, are integral to the dynamics of memory.