An exploration of some of the key theoretical challenges and conceptual issues facing the emergent field of memory studies, from the relationship between experience and memory to the commercial exploitation of nostalgia, using the key concept of the mnemonic imagination.

An exploration of some of the key theoretical challenges and conceptual issues facing the emergent field of memory studies, from the relationship between experience and memory to the commercial exploitation of nostalgia, using the key concept of the mnemonic imagination.

The Handbook of Imagination and Culture is a unique interdisciplinary collection of chapters showing the centrality of imagination in the development of persons and societies. This book brings together a group of psychologists, philosophers, social scientists, and artists to explore imagination through psychological, social, and cultural processes.

This book shows how the mnemonic imagination creatively uses the resources of photography and music in the registering and management of change. Looking in particular at major transitions and turning points, it covers key issues of identity for the remembering subject and key scales of remembering in vernacular milieus. The book explores the connections of memory and remembering with transformations in intimate relationships, migration and spatial mobilities, loss and bereavement involving loved ones or those with whom close affinities are felt, resulting in a volume that helps fill the gap in memory studies caused by lack of sustained ethnographic work. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on the processes and practices of remembering in everyday life, it demonstrates how the mnemonic imagination is central to the management of change and transition, and how its cross-temporal interanimations of past, present and future are fostered and facilitated by the visual and sonic resources of photography and recorded music.

The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage examines the social, cultural, political and economic value of popular music as history and heritage. Taking a cross-disciplinary approach, the volume explores the relationship between popular music and the past, and how interpretations of the changing nature of the past in post-industrial societies play out in the field of popular music. In-depth chapters cover key themes around historiography, heritage, memory and institutions, alongside case studies from around the world, including the UK, Australia, South Africa and India, exploring popular music’s connection to culture both past and present. Wide-ranging in scope, the book is an excellent introduction for students and scholars working in musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, memory studies and other related fields.

This book explores how photography and recorded music act as vehicles or catalysts in processes of remembering, and how they are regarded, treated, valued and drawn upon as resources connecting past and present in everyday life. It does so via two key concepts: vernacular memory and the mnemonic imagination.

Using a phenomenological and multi-sited ethnographic approach, this book focuses on children’s uses of digital media in three sites—London, Casablanca and Beirut—and situates the study of Arab children and screen media within a wider frame, making connections between local, regional and global media content. The study moves away from a conventional definition of media towards a pluralistic interpretation, and provides key ethnographic findings that reveal how the notion of home is extended across everyday spaces that children occupy. Exploring the relationship between children and media outside of the subject-object hierarchy, it re-connects them in a horizontal mapping of affectivity and intimacy. This book will appeal to scholars specializing in children and the media, digital media, media and cultural studies, media anthropology, philosophy and Middle Eastern studies.