In Between Old & New, Local & Transnational: Social Movements, Hybrid Media and the Challenges of Making Memories Move

Bisht, Pawas

Abstract

Social movement organisations (SMOs) remain under-examined in the burgeoning accounts of collective memory’s transnational movements. There is also an analytical neglect of the difficulties of making memories move and the constraints characterising emergent political fields enabled by the entanglement of remembering and digital media. Bisht addresses this neglected dimension through an examination of SMOs working for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster. The chapter focuses specifically on how SMO websites were mobilised for the development of a transnationally framed memory narrative of the disaster and the territorialisation of this online narrative in two specific ‘local’ contexts: Bhopal and London. Building upon Chadwick’s (2013) framework of the ‘hybrid media system’, the chapter demonstrates the value of ‘hybridity’ as an analytical lens to examine the specific contexts and complexities of SMO memory-work: combining online and offline strategies, communicating within the movement and to wider publics, and balancing local and transnational aims.

• Acceptance Date: Oct 24, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 20, 2020
• Publication Date: Feb 21, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: May 26, 2023
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 173-196
• Book Title: Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilizing Mediated Remembrance
• Chapter Number: 7
• ISBN: 978-3-030-32826-9; 978-3-030-32829-0
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_7
• Keywords: social movements, transnational memory, hybrid media, Bhopal Gas Disaster, digital media, cultural memory