Placeless memories? Transcultural memory, digital memory, and place

A central aspect of my research concerns the changing (and enduring) nature of memory, identity, and place in a globalising and digitising world. I have made critical interventions into scholarly debate on the transcultural circulation of memories, and I am also active in exploring the articulation of individual and social memory through digital technology. In particular, I am looking at the construction, negotiation, and contestation of Ottoman and post-Ottoman history by Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, and Turkish activists and Internet users. In an article in History & Memory (2018), I discuss how the expatriated Greeks of Turkey, in print and digital media, articulate and publicise narratives of their repression in Turkey by cross-referencing with the experiences and memories of other persecuted communities, most notably the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Jews. Although I find confirmation in this research that memories are not confined by national or ethnic boundaries, and that the sharing of memories of suffering might generate intercommunal solidarities, I nevertheless emphasise that these transcultural mnemonic movements frequently fortify rather than dissolve ethnic distinctions, national histories, and historical enmities. In 2017, I organised an interdisciplinary conference on place in digital memory at the University of York, and I am editor of a special issue of the journal Memory Studies (2021) in which we argue that place continues to matter in the digital world despite the apparent placelessness and shapelessness of digital media. This collection includes an article of my own on mutual expressions of solidarity and commonality by Armenian and Kurdish Internet users, and how these led to a tendency for Kurdish users to apologise for Kurdish complicity in the 1915 Armenian genocide, creating palimpsestic digital commemorations in which the Armenian genocide and the more contemporary Turkish-Kurdish conflict are collapsed into a new and synchronous virtual place of memory.