The Politics of Memory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

How the past should be remembered is contested in many countries. Why? Because collective memories-groups' shared representations of the past-are both powerful and malleable. They are malleable because they are not exclusively based on historical "facts". And they are powerful, because controlling the memory of the past means power to define what was, is and should be (illustrated, for example, by the extent to which remembrance of Britain's imperial past shapes how the public see the nation in a world context).Vying for this power, political actors, artists, and academics appear as memory entrepreneurs, aiming to preserve or challenge pervasive narratives. Common memory entrepreneurial actions range from statements by politicians about how the past should be remembered, to governments introducing memory laws, activists removing statues, or academics writing books. How do actions by memory entrepreneurs shape collective memory?While existing research studies how and why political leaders appear as memory entrepreneurs, recent research points out that we know less about the substantive content of collective memories, their malleability and, relatedly, the consequences of memory entrepreneurs' actions for collective memory-despite their commonness. A key challenge involved in researching collective memory lies in its measurement. Repeated surveys about how respondents remember past events are the most valid option, but their scalability is limited and there are few contexts in which memory questions have been asked at different points in time and/or across different countries. This project proposes an integrated theoretical and measurement framework that tackles this challenge and allows me to shed light on how nations' narratives about their past evolve over time and when and how memory entrepreneurial actions shape them. Leveraging recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) and the fact that Wikipedia is freely editable, and a complete revision history of each Wikipedia article is publicly available, I introduce and advance the use of revision histories of Wikipedia articles on historic figures, places and events as a basis for measuring respective language communities' collective memories. To empirically analyse collective memory content and change using Wikipedia content data, I will focus on two case studies: - Political activism and colonialism: BlackLivesMatter and the British Empire in the UK- Nativist populism and WWII: Historians, Politicians and the Holocaust in Poland and GermanyBoth case studies deal with narratives at the core of national identities which have recently been contested and exist in languages that have large Wikipedias. At the same time, they exhibit variation in terms of the memory entrepreneurs involved, the actions they take, and the countries/languages in which they play out. I will collect all versions of all Polish, and German Wikipedia content on WWII in Poland and of all English Wikipedia content on the British Empire between 2001 and 2025. In addition, I will systematically collect data on which memory entrepreneurs intervened when and how in the respective collective memories in the UK, Poland and Germany. Using these data, NLP techniques, and causal inference methods, I will describe WWII/Holocaust and British Empire/colonialism memory malleability, examine how memory entrepreneurs' actions shape them (with a focus on UK BlackLivesMatter protests and Polish and German nativist populist parties' policies and statements), and derive potential scope conditions for memory entrepreneurial effects.I creatively combine and advance research on social psychology, memory, political parties, identity politics, history, and measurement. Beyond the academy, I will also provide knowledge that is directly relevant for online information platforms and its contributors, as well as actors engaging in collective memory formation and organisations documenting such actions.