In 2008, the financial crisis exploded onto the global scene, causing a world-wide recession and damage to public finances. Governments quickly switched from fiscal stimulus to retrenchment. Despite economic stagnation, falling living standards and rising not falling government debt, rulers have stuck to their austerity guns since then. Arguably, the mainstream media have played a central role in communicating austerity to publics. This article analyses the framing of austerity by the UK media over time, from the financial meltdown of 2008 until late 2015. It charts the emergence of a fledgeling austerity narrative from before the term was in common use, the establishment of a dominant austerity frame in 2009, the building of the frame before and after the 2010 elections and the fluctuations within the frame after 2010. It finds that, although there are considerable differences among the five outlets studied and changes over time, the central message overall has been that some degree of austerity is painful but necessary, and the general population is constructed as obliged to pay for the crisis.

Enduring cultural memories are never made by politicians, monuments or individual media representations alone, although both media and politics (or power relations) are essential to their existence; they are formed and develop through a tangle of relations that reaches back and forth across time. Although questions of media, temporality and power have all been crucial to the field of memory studies, little work has been done on exactly how these elements interact to form memories that shift over time and what work they do in terms of identity formation and negotiation. Using the case of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and the idea of a memory dispositif, this article will explore some of these types of relations and how they function to assemble complex and contradictory group identities.Since Pierre Nora introduced the term lieu de mémoire over 25 years ago, it has been common currency in the field of memory studies. Surprisingly, the term seems not to have opened up perspectives from which to better understand cultural memory but rather to have closed them down, in an all-too-easy association of memory with place, though Nora himself intended its meanings be far wider ranging. Although issues of place and territory are important to understanding memory, I would like in this article to focus on three other elements that are crucial to the formation and development of group memories -mediation, temporality and power -and, importantly, how these categories interact with each other in what I call memory dispositifs. Using the case study of Australian outlaw and national hero Ned Kelly, I would like to explore some of these relations and the work they do in terms of identity formation and negotiation. I begin by introducing the concept of the dispositif, and specifically the idea of a memory dispositif; then I will examine some of the many ways issues of mediation, power relations and temporality have been addressed in memory studies and the links between memory and identity; and finally I will illustrate these processes via an analysis of the present-day remembrance of Ned Kelly.Memory Studies 4(1) 33-41

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