Remembering like a state: Surveillance databases, digital activist traces and the repressive potential of mediated prospective memory
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Departing from personal memories of protests in London and Berlin, in this article I make space within the memory-activism nexus to consider how contemporary activists are remembered by that which they conventionally target: the state. To do this, I first recount existing understandings of that nexus and the position of the state therein. I then emphasise how states remember activists via police surveillance databases before discussing the digital activist traces held in such databases via the concept of mediated prospective memory. Thereafter, I empirically ground these conceptual contributions via a discussion of the surveillance databases used in the United Kingdom and Germany and the growing adoption of automated facial recognition technology in these countries. This discussion relies on the work of police monitoring groups whose activism contributes, alongside the various actions of the state and its agencies that I foreground, to the complexity of the memory-activism nexus.
Source: Memory Studies
Author: Samuel Merrill
Institution: Umeå University
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,450
Funder: Vetenskapsrådet
OpenAlex ID: W4403258040