Remembering Today: Building Collective Memories through Digital Storytelling

This paper explores the methodological and liberatory capacity of digital storytelling to cultivate a “collective memory” of present-day crises. The concept of crisis is not new, and the sociological impacts of crisis events cut across time and memory. Yet, the historical erasure and systematic forgetting of the communities, collectives, and persons who have struggled with, responded to, and resisted the catastrophes, disasters, and atrocities of the past, have left those within the present unprepared for late-stage capitalism and neocolonialism, in which “crises” are commonplace. Although important work is being done to document and translate these histories within and to modern contexts, little research has considered how to better remember present day crisis for future generations. That is, the question of how to avoid collectively forgetting crises in the first place has often gone unaddressed. Bringing my dissertation research, From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards a Collective Memory of HIV/AIDS Resistance, in conversation with my postdoctoral research, Exaggerated Hunger: Addressing Racialized Food Insecurity in The Era Of COVID-19, I propose that digital stories, short videos that pair audio recordings of personal narratives with visuals and soundscapes, can be used to build collective memories in real-time. I argue that memory and sociology are both transtemporal projects that can and should be combined to generate knowledge and resources in a world defined by postcrisis and colonial injury, and that digital storytelling is a versatile enough method to facilitate this responsibility.