Here are some of our writings on memory covering a range of topics, for a variety of audiences.

 

Amanda Barnier

Memories, memory studies and my iPhone

In this editorial, published in October 2010 in our interdisciplinary academic journal Memory Studies (Vol 3, No 4, pp. 293-297), Amanda argues that people and/or objects (such as iPhones) scaffold failing memories as we age or face disease. It remains one of this journal’s most read articles.

Memory, ecological validity and a barking dog

In this editorial, published in October 2012 also in Memory Studies (Vol 5, No 4, pp. 351-359), Amanda argues that cognitive psychology can help build “good likenesses” of every day memory phenomena and urged researchers to embrace the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches.

Truth, memory and the trial of Oscar Pistorius

In this piece, published in April 2014 by The Conversation Australia (an online news and analysis website contributed to by academics), Amanda uses the science of memory to reflect on assumptions at work in the high-profile criminal trial of South African Olympian Oscar Pistorius. This piece has been read by nearly 24,000 readers, republished on a number of Australian and international news sites, and picked up by Australian and international television and radio media.

Serial: Murder, mystery and the science of memory

In this piece, published in November 2014 (also by The Conversation Australia), Amanda again uses the science of memory to comment on interpretations of remembering and forgetting in the wildly popular American podcast “Serial”.

 

Andrew Hoskins

Memory of the multitude: The end of collective memory

In a chapter in his new edited collection Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, Andrew explores the rise of a digital multitude and the memory of the multitude as a challenge to previous formations of memory imagined as ‘collective’, but also as a solution to the re-thinking of individual and social relations now blurred through their immersion in digital networks.

The end of decay time

In this 2013 Memory Studies editorial, Andrew argues that digital networks and media constitute a dormant connective memory, an often indiscriminate potential archive, which threatens a new kind of emergence of the past that could transform past personal, semi-public and public relations, affecting a new kind of uncertainty of modernity.

Digital records take something precious from military history

In this piece, published in February 2015 by The Conversation UK , drawing on his UK AHRC Historical Branch Army research, Andrew argues that the immediacy, scale and complexity of digital records are diminishing the prospects for future usable military history.

Media, memory, metaphor: Remembering and the connective turn

In this article published in 2011 in the journal Parallax, Andrew draws on media theories to explore how the biological, social and cultural divisions and distinctions of memory are collapsing.

Memory ecologies

Andrew provides a commentary on a 2016 interdisciplinary special issue of Memory Studies, using one of his key concepts (in media) connection to treat memory as a link between the individual and the collective past and future. He argues for an “ecology” or “expanded” view that treats remembering and forgetting holistically across its individual, collective and cultural types, uses and environments.