Youths, Media and Performance: How Young People Remember Violent Pasts
Associate Professor Birgit Bräuchler and Research Fellow at Leipzig University Sina Emde have edited a Special Issue of Anthropological Forum titled Youths, Media and Performance: How Young People Remember Violent Pasts.
In addition to curating this collection, they have contributed an article of the same name, which explores the pivotal role of young people in shaping performative and transgenerational memoryscapes in post-conflict settings. Bräuchler and Emde here develop the conceptual frame for the special issue and focus on how different media forms trigger, channel, and perform remembrance among the so-called postmemory generation, positioning media as both a vehicle and a practice of memory.
The Special Issue more generally argues that memory work aimed at fostering peaceful futures requires creative approaches that open spaces for reflection, reconstruction, and engagement, supported by conducive social contexts. It highlights how transgenerational memory is not merely a recollection of the past but an active construction in the present, oriented toward transformation.
Contributions examine youths’ creative practices of collective remembering and emphasise the role of media and performance in crafting transformative memoryscapes, including their transnational dimensions.
This Special Issue offers insights into the dynamics of memory, creativity, and agency in post-conflict societies, inviting readers to consider how young people engage with violent pasts to imagine better futures.
Go to the Special Issue and the article