The main objective of the research project is to identify new forms of power and social inequality that emerge through the use of digital commemorative media to structure the collective memory of women’s role in history by working on collective identity formation and subjectivation.
The project aims to understand how digital collaborative technologies of commemoration change the way in which people deal with various sort of historical knowledge, while creating a sense of the self in relation with memorable historical characters. In this context, the project aims to study how digital technologies of commemoration change people’s relationship with the past, with focus on how technologies support novel ways for people to define history by depicting characters form the past as relevant in the present lifeworld. The project considers how digital technologies support novel ways for people to define representative figures from the past by analysing interactive resources for narrating women’s lives as relevant actors. Ultimately, the project aims to explore the redefinition of the self that comes up with a redefinition of the women’s role in history through digital media of commemoration, and the implications of digital media for the consolidation of novel collective identities through commemorators’ self-making practices.
The research is guided by the following exploratory questions: (1) How women’s role in history is narrated through biographical writing in the digital realm? What kind of discourses emerge and what kind of vocabularies are employed? (2) How is the collective remembering accomplished by shaping women’s commemoration as a meaningful experience in online mnemonic communities? (3) How do commemorative practices become resources for collective identity formation and subjectivation (i.e. self-creation and self-transformation)? (4) How are these forms of subjectivation accomplished through technological mediation and how do they relate to the characteristics of the commemorative collaborative medium? (5) What forms of social and political power emerge through the digital collaborative commemoration of women’s role in history?