Youths, Media and Performance: How Young People Remember Violent Pasts

Abstract

In many post-conflict settings, youths are seminal actors in the construction of performative and transgenerational memoryscapes. In this special issue, we argue that to facilitate transformation towards more peaceful futures such memory work requires creative approaches that open up spaces for reflection, reconstruction and engagement, and supportive wider contexts. We aim to shed light on the dynamics of transgenerational memory as a construction of the past in the present that is directed towards a better future. Contributions to this special issue analyse young people’s creative practices of collective remembering in post-conflict settings and highlight the role of media and performance in the youth’s making of transformative memoryscapes as well as their transnational entanglements. We are specifically interested in how different kinds of media trigger, facilitate, channel or perform how young people, as part of the so-called postmemory generation, remember a violent past–seeing media as both vehicle and practice of remembrance.