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The first practical guide to research methods in memory studies. This book provides expert appraisals of a range of techniques and approaches in memory studies, and focuses on methods and methodology as a way to help bring unity and coherence to this new field of study.

This article sets out some of the analytical moves that are necessary to developing a distinctive area of research called postcolonial memory studies. A key barrier to synthesising insights from postcolonial and memory studies has been a reductive approach to analogue and digital technologies which operate as vehicles for memory. Three analytical moves are needed to decentre, or at the very least de-naturalise the technological narratives and ecologies of Europe and the US. Media memory studies needs to draw more effectively on postcolonial studies to position mediated memory as inextricably connected to the legacies of colonialism and empire; develop a much broader account of media infrastructures emerging from what is increasingly characterised as ‘global media studies’; make an empirical and analytical shift away from the primacy of digital communications technologies and to explore technologies, not just as artefacts but as knowledge generating cultural practices. The combined value of these three shifts in approaches to media and communications technologies in memory studies research has considerable potential for developing postcolonial media memory studies research which offers a thorough and empirically grounded analysis of the complex ways in which the legacies of colonialism shape and structure the ways in which practices and performances of remembering are mediated in contemporary social life. This shift towards postcolonial memory studies can be seen as part of the wider project of what Anna (Amza) Reading has in this volume called ‘rewilding memory’ by rethinking ‘the underlying ecologies of knowledge within studies of memory’.

Memory has enjoyed a well charted resurgence in the postwar period in cultural production, social life and academic study (see Huyssen 2000; Misztal 2003; Radstone 2000). The social dislocations that occurred in the aftermath of the world wars, and the radical trauma of the Holocaust, threw into sharp relief issues of remembrance and commemoration (Wolf 2004; Margalit 20002). In more recent years, a growing disillusionment with the rhetoric of progress which has been so central to modernity has required a reconsideration of pasts that had been hurriedly discarded. At this historical juncture memory is becoming an increasingly key feature of

The previous chapter dealt with methods for researching and analysing television’s construction of memory through programming designed to commemorate a specific, historically significant event, or delineate the family history of famous people in relation to a broader historical canvas. As was shown, memory as resource and re-enactment in these programmes becomes operative through various combinations of personal and public memory, and while they are nationally broadcast, their reception is local and particular. It is to the local and particular that we now turn in a more concerted fashion. We continue to focus on visual media, but move from memory construction

While memory studies has emerged as a diverse and heterogeneous body of work, a common issue over the last two decades has been with the ways in which the past is reconstructed in the present, regardless of whether this involves macro-structures such as the nation-state or the everyday minutiae of personal experience. The different perspectives and their associated scales of analysis which are brought to bear on this concern may be various, but they share a concern with the use of the past as a resource in making experience and social life meaningful, in producing or challenging cultural norms and

The ever-amiable Georgian clergyman, Sydney Smith, was one day walking with a friend through a narrow street in old Edinburgh when they came across two women leaning out of opposite attic windows cursing and arguing with each other. They listened for a while, after which Smith observed that it was no wonder they were in disagreement, for they were arguing from diff erent premises.¹ This is a suitable parable for memory studies because all too often, arguments, along with their attendant suppositions, claims and statements, are joined from diff erent premises without it being clear why those premises have been