11.2. New Perspectives on Memory: Activism, Theory, and Lived Experience

“The real Russia is here, standing in this line,” reads a 2024 article by the human rights group OVD-Info, covering the mass gathering at the funeral of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow. “Conversations in the Line” was the title of the talk show accompanying the 2023 live stream of the Returning of the Names action by the NGO Memorial. “100 Years of the Queue” was the theme of a 2017 special issue of The Slavic and East European Journal, reflecting on Soviet cultures of assembly. Beyond a mere pain point of chronic shortages under the socialist command economy, the Soviet queue has been studied as an important communicative, symbolic, and mnemonic space— a focal social formation of Soviet Communism. Since 2018, the practice of queueing in Russia has reemerged and come to embody a range of protest strategies: from lines to take part in solitary pickets that resisted restrictions on public assembly, to wartime queues of protest voters during Putin’s most recent “re-election,” to an immense line to the grave of Navalny – the leader of Russian opposition killed in prison, to last year’s record-breaking participation in Returning of the Names, with lines forming in 143 cities across 52 countries. Through sensory ethnography and media analysis, I demonstrate how, over the past twelve years of escalating authoritarianism in Russia, standing in a line has evolved into a distinct form of political performance, intertwined with the Soviet-era cultures and politics of waiting. This research emphasizes the embodied and sensory dimensions of memory and protest and, following Jeniffer Ponce De Leon, approaches aesthetics as a specific site of struggle within human rights imaginaries and movements.

This study explores digital abortion memorials as sites of conservative memory activism by drawing upon the qualitative content analysis of two abortion memorial websites. These findings demonstrate a recurring theme of perceived loss of motherhood, which reflects broader Evangelical discourses that frame abortion as a threat to maternal identity and societal values. Building on the definition that memory activism is a “strategic commemoration of a contested past to achieve mnemonic or political change by working outside state channels,” this study positions digital abortion memorials as sites of grief that act as both a platform for and practice of memory activism (Gutman & Wüstenberg, 2023). By emphasizing lived experiences over institutional rhetoric, digital abortion memorials demonstrate how memory activism operates as milieux de mémoire, as well as how religious right actors participate in memory activism. Thus, this paper contributes to the emerging field of memory activism by offering a nuanced account of female antiabortion advocacy within digital memory work, allowing memory activist scholars to better understand how memory activism operates within religious, often Evangelical, right-wing contexts. Ref: Gutman, Yifat, and Jenny Wüstenberg, eds. 2023. The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism. First. Rutledge.

This paper aims to conceptualize mnemonic violence as an analytical tool to identify and critique structural, symbolic, and epistemic forms of violence within cultural memory. It asks how processes of remembering and forgetting reproduce social hierarchies and epistemic asymmetries that determine who or what becomes rememberable. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence, the concept situates memory as both a representation and a site of violence. Through theoretical synthesis and conceptual reconstruction, the paper delineates three structural dimensions of mnemonic violence—epistemic, symbolic, and material-aesthetic—and distinguishes six forms: testimonial, silencing, representational, impositional, medial, and temporal violence. The analysis reveals that mnemonic violence functions through mechanisms such as exclusion, delegitimation, distortion, and coercive exposure within historiography, archives, and commemorative practices. It demonstrates how memory regimes normalize inequality by rendering certain subjects, knowledges, and temporalities invisible or illegible. In doing so, the concept bridges discourse-analytic and social-theoretical perspectives, revealing the entanglement of habitus, knowledge, and mnemonic practices in the reproduction of domination. Ultimately, mnemonic violence extends the analytical scope of “violence” beyond its physical form, offering a heuristic framework and critical vocabulary for diagnosing and countering the subtle yet pervasive mechanisms through which cultural memory itself can become violent.

This paper explores the dynamics between the collective memorability of minorities, their histories, and social justice. I propose that these dynamics can be effectively conceptualized through the notion of hermeneutical (in)justice (Fricker 2007). By examining the recent attack on the statue of Elias Lönnrot—the creator of Finland’s national epic—in Helsinki as an example of memory activism, this paper analyzes how memory, temporality, and social (in)justice, along with themes related to colonialism, nationalism, World War II, and the minority group known as the Karelians, were reflected, instrumentalized, negotiated, and contested in the public discussions surrounding this intervention. I argue that, rather than being viewed as a contemporary debate about the legacies of the past, national memory culture, or minority rights in the present, the activists’ critique was primarily treated as a matter of historical fact – or the lack thereof. When approached as a contemporary issue, this critique was often linked to current Russian hybrid warfare. In other words, there was a tendency to perceive the activists’ critique as a tool for undermining national unity in Finland and as an external threat to national security. Consequently, discussions about historical injustices or mnemonic biases related to the Karelians in Finnish society were sidestepped. I propose that this reaction reflects what I term the tendency toward mnemonic conformity within Finnish society regarding certain nationally significant historical events. I argue that the tendency toward mnemonic conformity can negatively affect particularly transnational minorities, by enforcing hermeneutical injustice stemming from the incompatibility of their experiences with national memory culture and narrowing their democratic space. This tendency can also have broader negative implications for democracy. If memories that challenge hegemonic narratives are only rejected and treated as existential threats, society’s capacity to resist authoritarian memory politics may weaken.