The temporal nexus of collective memory mediation: print and digital media in Brazil’s Landless Movement 1984-2019

Abstract

Social movement scholarship has increasingly shown how continuous mobilization depends on collective memory construction. This article sets out to study this formative activity in a changing media landscape. It asks how activists navigate the temporal nexus of collective memory mediation. The empirical focus is on Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), a well-established organization that since the early 1980s has communicated its collective memories on several media platforms. This article also demonstrates, through a corpus analysis of MST's internal newspaper, Jornal Sem Terra , and its Facebook page (2014-2019), how collective memories of rural violence serve various functions in these different media. The empirical study verifies the formative implication of rural violence for Brazil's landless movement, but also unveils notable differences between the newspaper and Facebook in this regard. Whereas Jornal Sem Terra employed a horizontal collective memory construction through contemporary documentation of ongoing and upcoming events, the Facebook posts primarily engaged in the vertical extraction of already established memories. In other words, the print media produced a narrative around collective memories of rural violence, and these memories were re-produced through digital media platforms. These empirical findings implicate that renewed methodologies are needed in future studies of social movements.

Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

“…Studies on Africa focused on major conflicts in Zimbabwe, such as the 1964–1979 Rhodesian Bush War (Kirkegaard, 2017) and the 1983–1987 Gukurahundi genocide (Ndlovu, 2018), on the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda (Buckley-Zistel and Williams, 2020), on South African national identity after the abolition of apartheid (Bosch, 2020). On South America, a single study analysed the SNS heritage of the military dictatorship and social movements in Brazil from the 1970s to the 1990s (Lundström and Sartoretto, 2021).…”

An Ontology of Semiotic Activity and Epistemic Figuration of Heritage, Memory and Identity Practices on Social Network Sites

“…Related frequently occurring concepts to remediation , drawing from on the work on andrew hoskins , are media memory and connective memory (Birkner & Donk, 2020; Carter-White, 2018; de Smale, 2020; Mahmutović & Baraković, 2021; Makhortykh, 2019, 2020; Rutten et al, 2013). Interestingly, the notion of mediatized memory appears more often than the concept of mediatization , defined by mediatization theory as a (meta)process whereby media become constitutive of social phenomena (Lundström & Sartoretto, 2022). media ecology is used in a somehow similar sense, to explain the evolution of polarized discourses related to troubled identity and political dependency (Osuri, 2019).…”