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The history of the memory and commemoration of the First World War in British culture has long been the subject of academic debate. In particular, numerous studies have explored the significance of place, both local and national, to the creation and continuity of commemorative practices across the past 100 years. The current years of the centenary provide a particularly useful point of reference for exploring the development of cultural memory of the First World War in Britain, while the village of Ambridge forms a unique case study of local and national commemorative practices.

This chapter examines two forms of commemoration represented in The Archers, the episodic marking of Remembrance Sunday across a 30-year period from 1996 to the present, and the community’s engagement with national commemorative events in the centenary year 2014. It locates both these forms of commemoration in Nora’s (1996) concept of lieux de memoire, the key symbolic elements of community memorial heritage, and Hobsbawm’s (1983) definitions of invented traditions as those which are imposed upon communities rather than emerging organically from them. In doing so it argues that place functions as the key element of Ambridge’s role as a lieu de memoire of the war, in contrast to people whose stories appear as invented traditions, particularly in 2014. It concludes that the programme ultimately maintains its ability to function as a lieu de memoire across the period, not only for the community of Ambridge, but also for the wider national community of Archers listeners.

Cultural heritage and memory are essential mechanisms for the formation of individual and group identity, contributing to a sense of belonging in society. More specifically, built heritage (the buildings, structures and monuments associated with our cultural history) reflect our individual and collective decisions about what is important to preserve and remember into the future, further shaping our identities as citizens of Waterford. Thus, our relationship with heritage is just as much about looking forward into our social imagination for the future of Waterford city as it is about reflecting on our past.

Sites of Conscience are a specific type of built heritage which signify a society's belief that by remembering difficult pasts we can interrogate our current lived realities and create meaningful change in the future (International Coalition for Sites of Consciousness, 2022). Sites of Conscience are akin to what French historian Pierre Nora (1989) referred to as ‘les lieux de mémoire’, or places of memory. These physical spaces can connect past traumas and struggles to our present lives. As places of memory which ask us to acknowledge the past, Sites of Conscience can prevent the erasure of historical traumas and stand as an act of restorative justice, providing safe spaces for citizens to engage with difficult memories.

One such site of conscience in Waterford is the complex of buildings located at the College Street Campus of the South East Technological University. The site comprises the former convent of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers (commonly known as the Good Shepherd Sisters); the St Mary's Good Shepherd (Magdalene) Laundry; and St Dominick's Industrial School. The site was occupied in 1884 and the Laundry operated until its closure in 1982 (Department of Justice, 2013). This chapter will consider the former Magdalene Laundry and Industrial School's cultural and heritage significance to Waterford as a site of conscience, which encourages the citizens of Waterford not only to connect our past to our present, but to connect these memories to current actions to create a more just society into the future.

The built heritage of this complex acts as a powerful memory aide of a shared local history, allowing citizens to connect this past to related contemporary human rights issues. In this way, the former Laundry and Industrial School can stimulate discussions on gendered violence today, or to interrogate modern forms of institutionalisation such as Direct Provision. The chapter will further consider how these connections are even more important when our need to remember and recognise past atrocities are met with social, political, economic or cultural pressure to forget. Sometimes the desire for erasure is understandable; we want to commit events to the past and move on. However, such erasure can further disempower survivors of these institutions; prevent current and future generations from learning critical lessons; and dismantle future opportunities for healing and reconciliation. In this context, Sites of Conscience offer an opportunity to connect a difficult past to visions of a more socially just city of the future.

The relationship between collective memory and the built environment is a complex relationship. Though the concept of memory is fragile, the maintenance and continuation of urban memory are essential to maintain groups' identities and to support the sense of place and place attachment between community members and the architectural settings they use and/or reside in. Preserving the physical aspects of buildings, spaces and settings that are linked with memory, is important to preserve the memory, however, the mere preservation does not guarantee the continuation of memory. The maintenance and continuation of memory is a process that depends on several factors, where the preservation of the physical aspects is only one among several. This paper aims at a better understanding of the intricate relationship between collective memory and the built environment, focusing on the processes of formation, stimulation and consolidation of memory. The paper sheds the lights on historic houses that are embedded with significant meanings and memories to their social contexts. It claims that historic houses can easily shift from ‘potential cultural memory' to ‘actual cultural memory' that could act as pillars of memory to their surrounding community, if the conservation process is done comprehensively, that is to include not only the physical and spatial aspects of memory but also to tackle the social dimensions of memory as well. The paper is organized into three sections: the first investigates the memory formation process, focusing on the social and the spatial dimension of memory, then the second investigates the possible channels to memory stimulation and consolidation, and finally, as a case study, the third section investigates the memory of two historic houses in Cairo, Egypt. The review of the works undertaken in the two houses highlights the difference and the distance between the concept of restoration and the essence of conservation. Findings yielded that, urban memory is an important aspect of cultural heritage that should to be captured and preserved for current and future generations, an aspect that is missing in local conservation approaches. Moreover, to be maintained, urban memory needs physical, social and moral props.

Using oceanographer Rachel Carson's study The Edge of the Sea (1955) to contextualise tidal spaces, this chapter discusses how constantly shifting and eroding coastlines act as a site for writing, re-writing and performing acts of cultural and personal memory. It also considers the ecological impact of human activity on tidal spaces and their more-than-human inhabitants.

14-18 NOW's Pages of the Sea, directed by Danny Boyle, invited communities around the United Kingdom to meet on their local beach to commemorate those who were lost in World War I by marking portraits in the tidal sands. Choreographer Chloë Smith's Tidal, performed in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 2015, was commissioned as a commemorative work but became an act of personal memorialising when Smith's brother drowned prior to the event. Performance company Curious's Out of Water (2012–2014), invites participants on a dawn-walk to the shoreline exploring memory, time, genealogy and water through song and movement. My own collaborative site-responsive work, Tide Times (2018), created with electroacoustic composer Tim Cooper for the tidal island of Cramond, explores the multiple identities of place over time. Tide Times encouraged audiences to create their own tidal poems and artworks through a series of invitations in treasure chests hidden around the island.

In explicating these aforementioned artworks, which explore ideas of remembrance using tidal spaces, this chapter will also acknowledge the forgetting that is implicit in performing these actions. What can the legacy of commemorations traced in such a transient and precarious space as a tidal zone be? This chapter argues that while shorelines provide sites for large and small scale acts of public remembering, they are simultaneously acts of forgetting as the twice daily tides cause inevitable erasure.

The research aim of this article is to generate novel insights into how public sector organizations (PSOs) strategically communicate with the public about critical issues on social media. To this end, the study explores the public's experiences of the Swedish Police's sense of safety communication on Instagram in the third largest city in Sweden, where the lack of a sense of public safety is a main societal challenge.

The research was designed as a case study employing photo-elicitation interviews as a method to collect the empirical material. A phenomenography approach was used to analyze public experiences of the Swedish Police's Instagram communication in Malmö, Sweden.

Findings show that the police's strategic communication of safety on Instagram is experienced along the dimensions of a sense of protection, a sense of proximity and a sense of ambiguity. Taken together, these dimensions broaden and develop the knowledge of what communicating a sense of safety in the public sphere entails.

This study adds to previous research on strategic communication in public sector organizations by demonstrating what strategic communication accomplishes at the receiving end outside of the organization.

With the ubiquitous spread of the Selfie as a central feature of millennial digital practices, this article examines the impact of digital media on the traditional uses of the snapshot as a record of private life, particularly in terms of the family and circles of friends. It argues that the affordances of digital photography and social media lead to a transformation of the snapshot into the Selfie. The Selfie as a kind of performance impacts the social practices of family photography in a variety of ways. Some positive, in that the affordances of digital photography put the opportunity for the public circulation of self-selected Kodak “moments” which show the individual in the best possible light; and some negative since the new emphasis on the body as a vehicle of self-expression sustains a tournament based on appearances. The resultant shift from notions of the gift economy implicit in practices of family photography leads to the personal snapshot becoming a proto-commodity form in which the competitive logic of Celebrity culture pervades the social exchange of the photograph. The chapter closes with consideration of the importance of the Selfie across the life course and the logic of self-impression management as a digital performance.

The focus of this paper is a comparative case study of the symbolic role of the Croatian and Serbian languages and writing in discourses of the Nation and the National. Our research is situated at the intersection of the scientific fields of sociolinguistics, memory studies, and studies on nationalism. Using Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolist approach to the study of nationalism, which focuses on the reciprocal relationship between elites and the people, we analyze the case of anti-Cyrillic protests in Vukovar, Croatia, which were triggered by the implementation of Croatian minority rights legislation. This research analyses the role of language and its use as a symbol in memory practices and accompanying discourses in Croatia and its echoes in Serbian public space. The top-down perspective observes state-promoted events and populist implications of language mis(use). Alternatively, the bottom-up approach encompasses various actions and initiatives of so-called “activists” who belong either to “nationalist” organizations or to liberal/democratic NGOs. The majority of voices that are not aligned with the above-mentioned organizations are neglected in the public space (Obradovic-Wochnik, 2013).

We explore the dynamics created between social groups promoting populist ideas, other groups promoting alternative practices, and their influence on the ideological pattern adopted by ruling elites.