This volume of essays is a reflection on social memory as a force for social and economic transformation. Written by scholars and organic intellectuals, it focuses on the uses of social memory, in particular the conflict between the legacies of colonialism and the movement for fundamental change. The content addresses both experts and ordinary citizens alike, with a view to advancing discourse on where we are right now, and how we move on from here to achieve meaningful transformation. As scholars and public representatives with a deep understanding of the social, economic and political dynamics of modern history of South Africa, the contributors offer their unique perspectives and reflections on history, politics, economics, culture, education, ethics and the arts, as well as the links that bind these aspects into an ecology of ideas and attitudes.

Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space explores the effects of major upheavals—wars, decolonization, and other social and economic changes—on the ways in which public histories are presented around the world. Examining issues related to public memory in twelve countries, the histories collected here cut across political, cultural, and geographic divisions. At the same time, by revealing recurring themes and concerns, they show how basic issues of history and memory transcend specific sites and moments in time. A number of the essays look at contests over public memory following two major political transformations: the wave of liberation from colonial rule in much of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America during the second half of the twentieth century and the reorganization of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc beginning in the late 1980s. This collection expands the scope of what is considered public history by pointing to silences and absences that are as telling as museums and memorials. Contributors remind us that for every monument that is erected, others—including one celebrating Sri Lanka’s independence and another honoring the Unknown Russian Soldier of World War II—remain on the drawing board. While some sites seem woefully underserved by a lack of public memorials—as do post–Pinochet Chile and post–civil war El Salvador—others run the risk of diluting meaning through overexposure, as may be happening with Israel’s Masada. Essayists examine public history as it is conveyed not only in marble and stone but also through cityscapes and performances such as popular songs and parades. Contributors James Carter John Czaplicka Kanishka Goonewardena Lisa Maya Knauer Anna Krylova Teresa Meade Bill Nasson Mary Nolan Cynthia Paces Andrew Ross Daniel Seltz T. M. Scruggs Irina Carlota Silber Daniel J. Walkowitz Yael Zerubavel

In October 2022, the 20th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concluded, extending Xi Jinping's leadership indefinitely, which many view as a one-party dictatorship. Exploring Confucian and socialist principles, this book examines the relationship between the citizens and leaders in the Chinese autocracy. By applying a Foucauldian twist to a range of topics – from discussing the politics of love and pandemic nationalism to analysing Xi’s personality – it challenges the binary of authoritarianism and democracy. Interdisciplinary in nature, it will appeal to scholars and students working in the fields of politics, international relations, culture studies and critical theory.

This book assesses landmark empirical studies, state capture concerns, corruption, and fraud in South Africa’s public sector and thereby reflect on issues of accountability and ethics as cornerstones of governance. Bringing together some of the best minds about corruption, ethics, and governance from a multidisciplinary perspective, the book pushes critical thinking to interrogate interventions that could stamp out and stop the rot of corruption in society. The book investigates the behaviours of officials and politicians engaging in acts of corruption and considers how state institutions have been captured and corrupted by these people. Considering South Africa’s historical and regional context, the book also considers the role of watchdogs, auditors, and public opinion. In suggesting mechanisms for combating and preventing corruption, the book ultimately advocates for long-lasting preventive interventions instead of current short-lived and costly approaches to combating corruption. Combining original case studies, empirical work, and some comparisons in Zimbabwe and Botswana with South Africa, this book will be of interest to students, researchers, and policymakers working on corruption, ethics, and governance from the context of public administration and law.

This edited volume addresses memory practices among youth, families, cultural workers, activists, and engaged citizens in Lebanon and Morocco. In making a claim for ‘the social life of memory,’ the introduction discusses a particular research field of memory studies, elaborating an approach to memory in terms of social production and engagement. The Arab Spring is evoked to draw attention to new rifts within and between history and remembrance in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East. As authoritarian forms of governance are challenged, official panoramic narratives are confronted with a multiplicity of memories of violent pasts. The eight chapters trace personal and public inventories of violence, trauma, and testimony, addressing memory in cinema, in newspapers and periodicals, as an experience of public environments, through transnational and diasporic mediums, and amongst younger generations.

Over 70% of food production is in the hands of farmers; however, numerous studies have shown that smallholder farmers do not have access to markets. The reasons for this failure have been attributed to a lack of financial resources and infrastructure. To date, no one has questioned the role that graduates, academics, agricultural economists, and agricultural extension officials play in the plight of market access. Global Agricultural and Food Marketing in a Global Context: Advancing Policy, Management, and Innovation discusses key aspects of the agricultural marketing context including the policy environment, the available local markets and how they operate, the conditions and requirements for international trade, the logistic system operations, and the technology developments in marketing. Covering topics such as produce, food production, and digital marketing, this reference work is ideal for farmers, government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, academicians, practitioners, educators, and students.

Memory is a fundamental aspect of being and becoming, intimately entwined with space, time, place, landscape, emotion, imagination and identity. Memory studies is a burgeoning field of enquiry drawing from a range of social science, arts and humanities disciplines including human geography, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, heritage and museum studies, psychology and history. This book is a critically theorised practical exposition of how media and technology are used to make memories for museums, archives, social movements and community projects, looking at specific cases in the UK and Brazil where the authors have put these theories into practice. The authors define the protocol they present as social memory technology. Critically, this book is about learning to deal with our pasts and learning new methods of connecting our pasts across cultures toward a shared understanding and application of memory technologies.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of culture in single-industry communities facing the loss of their major industry. In a series of innovative case studies extending from New Zealand and Slovenia to the contemporary Nordic and Baltic States, the contributors address a wide range of topical issues. These include the role of the community’s past as a marker of its newly reconstructed identity and the importance of local traditions, landscapes, and place-related memories in post-industrial communities formerly dependent on one single employer or industry. The empirical case studies emphasise the role of cultural memory and local identity as communal strategies of survival and perseverance in such places and provide fresh perspectives into this turn to culture. The four parts of the book address such topics as the symbolic governance of change, tradition as capital, narratives as collective memories, and post-Soviet transition in comparative perspective. The team of international contributors hails from Australia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, and Slovenia and represents the fields of sociology, cultural policy, cultural history, landscape studies, and geography.

Research in collective memory is a relatively new area capturing the interest of scholars in social psychology, memory, sociology, and anthropology. The core idea is that collective attitudes and behaviors are created and shared through common experiences and communication among a cohort of people. For example, people born between 1940 and 1960 are often defined via the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War. Their parents typically experienced lesser impact from these events. Papers about collective memory have appeared in the literature under different guises for the last hundred years. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Jung's ideas on the collective unconscious, and McDougall's speculation on the group mind posited that identity and action could be viewed as resulting from the shared development of a culture. Halbwachs, a French social psychologist (1877-1945) who was the first to write in detail about the nature of collective memory, argued that basic memory processes were all social. That is, people remember only those events that they have repeated and elaborated in their discussions with others. In the last several years, there has been a resurgence of interest in this general topic because it addresses some fundamental questions about memory and social processes. Work closely related to these questions deals with the nature of autobiographical memory, traumatic experience and reconstructive memory, and social sharing of memories. This book brings together an international group of researchers who have been empirically studying some basic tenets of collective memory.