The White Terror in Taiwan was a 43-year period during which the Kuomintang (KMT) regime, with significant support from the United States during the Cold War era, persecuted its political opponents, imprisoning tens of thousands of people and executing some 1200. In the wake of democratisation since the 1980s, Taiwan has instituted a scheme of transitional justice to acknowledge and atone for the past political oppression and to promote national reconciliation. As this initiative was undertaken by the same regime that perpetrated the White Terror, questions of objectivity and transparency arise. Accordingly, this thesis aims to assess the progress of transitional justice in Taiwan by examining the official discourse on the subject and also analysing the non-official discourses amongst survivors of the White Terror in present-day Taiwan. Tensions between the different discourses are identified. This thesis focuses on the construction of the past in the present, which refers to contestation of the past in the context of present-day society in Taiwan. Drawing on discursive analysis of Taiwan’s transitional justice initiatives since the late 1990s, as well as in-depth interviews with 24 former political prisoners, it discerns how the official transitional justice discourse is circumscribed and limits our knowledge of the White Terror. Since the implied fall of communism, the aim of reconciliation has not embraced the former socialists and communists at the global level, enabling the KMT government to elude accountability in its transitional justice efforts by rationalising the White Terror in the name of anti-communism. As a result, Taiwan’s socialist dissidents remain stigmatised in the official discourse, which offers redress only to those individuals who disassociate themselves with subversion and identify as ‘political victims’. This restriction in the official discourse suggests that the government wishes to reconcile only with those who were ‘innocent’ of treason. By the same token, the identity of White Terror victims is de-politicised, distorting the content of their trauma and shame and their survivorhood in present-day Taiwan. Informants’ non-official discourses, which point up the contradictions in the government discourse, reveal that survivors tend to feel profound shame owing to the failure of their political projects, viewing themselves as inept revolutionaries. Much of their interest in transitional justice lies in seeking opportunities to advocate for the causes to which they still adhere. Thus, their identity as survivors is focused less on persecution than on sustaining their political activism in the era of reconciliation. Thus, the tension between the official and non-official transitional justice discourses in Taiwan is not only a contestation of the past but, more profoundly, a contestation of the vision for the nation’s future.

This Degree Project (DP) deals with the discourses about collective memory in Chile 45 years after a coup d’état that gave way to a dictatorship that lasted for 17 years, during which serious human rights violations were committed. How different actors relate to this traumatic period shows how this is a field of struggle in contemporary Chile.Collective memory has become a key theoretical concept for describing how social groups make sense of their common past. It is deeply entrenched with notions of identity, agency and change. Whereas collective memory is an abstract notion, it has to be somehow concretized in order to allow individuals to activate their own memories, opinions and reactions. Thus, media play a fundamental role in the construction of collective memory. Drawing on a constructivist approach, media are not fixed containers of memories but they actually work on how people perceive their past in relation to the present and the future. This (DP) focuses on the following questions: How do media contribute to the construction of the collective memory around the coup d’état and the military dictatorship in Chile? What are the discourses they diffuse and to what end? Which are the other counter-hegemonic discourses available in the Chilean society?In order to answer these questions, this DP uses a Critical Discourse Analysis of of the two main Chilean newspapers (La Tercera and El Mercurio) complemented with interviews to memory agents. The conclusions point out that these newspapers have a role in diffusing as well as constructing hegemonic discourses around this period of the Chilean history. They do so, mainly by silencing the voices of the civil society making their goals of social change difficult to achieve.

Since the 1960s the memory of the Finnish SS-volunteers has been seen as a special group which did not participate in the atrocities while serving in Waffen-SS. A new study about the Finnish SS-volunteers was published at the end of 2018 sparking an active discussion about the role of Finns in the Holocaust and atrocities in World War II. The debate about the painful past further invigorated when the National Archives of Finland carried out an archival survey concluding that volunteers most likely participated in atrocities against Jews, civilians and prisoners of war. This master thesis investigates the discussion that took place in the newspapers, tabloids and journals, and based on the arguments used, it analyses how the memory of Finnish SS-volunteers is dealt with in Finnish society. The discussion confirms that there are uncomfortable parts in Finland's past which are yet to be dealt with and the old interpretations of Finland having separate war and being a victim still has a meaningful place in the historical consciousness. There is also a need to further investigate the empty pages of Finnish history, the painful ones too.

In this thesis, using Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s “Meiro” (Maze, 1991) and Nakandakari Hatsu’s “Hahatachi onnatachi” (Mothers/Women, 1984) as primary sources, I have pursued two main questions about postwar Okinawan literature: the question of how memory is transmitted, along gender lines, about a traumatic past through the generations and the question of yuta operating as transmitters, mediators, and anchors of cultural identity under the threat of foreign influence. Both “Maze” and “Mothers/Women” address the issue of postwar Okinawan identity in the face of an influx of new ideas and practices by portraying Okinawan women’s struggle to find their identity. These two stories reveal the link between women’s spirituality and the construction of Okinawan postwar identity. In doing so, they demonstrate how the Okinawan religious view of women as spiritual and religious figures have inspired Okinawan authors to construct narratives of postwar Okinawan society and Okinawan people’s lives therein.

This dissertation examines the cultural and lived experiences of economic abandonment in deindustrialized zones by exploring how residents of a former single-industry economy negotiate this process via communicative constructions of identity, class, and social memory. As this work examines the conflicts about economic decline, class, and memory that inform the predicament of the residents of small towns within Appalachia and beyond, it contributes to ethnographies of deindustrialization in advanced capitalist societies, in zones of mass mineral extraction, as well as to other work on the Appalachian Region. The analysis of these constructions is based on three sets of data: material gathered during two years of offline ethnographic fieldwork in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, autoethnography, and the collaboration with local participants vis-à-vis a multi-modal and multi-sited "public digital humanities collaboratory" called “the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania Digital Project” (the latter, a term I develop to expand the methodological vocabulary), to which community members contributed through communication forums about the history, culture, and media representations of the Coal Region. Three narrative chapters analyze a series of lived experiences and theoretical concerns. The first of these chapters, chapter four, analyzes how place, identity, and memory link with past and present class, labor, and industrial dynamics, as well as landscapes left to ruin to demonstrate how, in the Anthracite Region “King Coal” maintains hegemony. Although the mining industry no longer exists as a viable form of employment, inhabitants still consider themselves residents of “The Coal Region,” and dialogue with modes of identification that evolved in the Anthracite Coal Region. These identifications unite earlier diverse, pan-ethnic identities tied to Europe and are at the basis of the emergence of a new subjectivity—a "coalcracker"—one with family who worked in the mines literally “cracking the coal.” As the landscapes are left to ruin, I develop the term "environmental classism" to conceptualize the impact of the fallout from King Coal. Chapter five examines dominant mediated imaginaries of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which have become cultural tropes for a modern ghost town. In these dominant narratives, the obliteration of Centralia, subject to an underground mine fire for 57 years, has been largely produced for the consumption, commodification, commercialization, and the aesthetic experience of either tourists or horror genre fans. I term this production "cultural extractivism" or the expropriation of cultural resources, memory artifacts, images, narratives, or stories extracted from a marginalized or forgotten community or culture for use by a dominant community or culture. The chapter shows local residents challenging such "cultural extractivisms." Chapter six examines the demolition of the Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, the last anthracite coal breaker and the largest one in the world, a topic that surfaced on the "public digital humanities collaboratory" and compelled considerable discussion. Research on this discussion demonstrates that this structure served as a coping mechanism for community members. Local residents constructed labor-related identities tied to social memory around it. These analyses of how Coal Region residents used their agency to create artifacts suggest that media can be a site of resistance. In addition to the artifacts presented on the "public digital humanities collaboratory," community members submitted and curated their own (unsolicited) artifacts. Theoretical flashpoints emerged, often resulting in local residents issuing challenges to dominant narratives and politics about the Coal Region. This ethnographic research involves offline immersive contact with informants extending to online interactions that resulted in methodological and theoretical expansions which provide the basis for communication scholars and ethnographers 1. to rethink ideas about how they conceive online and offline spaces previously thought of in binary terms; and, 2. likewise to reconsider ethnographic research on economic abandonment in marginalized communities beyond urban and rural binaries. / Media & Communication

Communicating Legacy: Media, Memory, and Harvey Milk examines publicly available media, artifacts and events in service of remembering Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Although he addressed issues of a diverse constituency, Milk is often remembered for demanding gay rights, his co-authorship of the San Francisco’s Human Rights Ordinance, and a successful campaign against the passage of Proposition 6 in 1978, a state proposition to prohibit gay men and lesbian women from working in public schools. His political career ended weeks later, when Milk was assassinated, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, by former city supervisor and colleague Dan White. Forms of public and popular media addressing the remembrance of Milk and communicating his legacy include: journalism, books, documentary and fiction film, public art, theatrical and musical performances, memorials, commemorations, public history exhibitions, as well as types of legacy-naming. I term this media material media memoria – material in service of remembering. Through a mix of textual methods (visual/narrative/discourse), fieldwork (participant observation, interviewing) and archival/historical research methods, I examine how Milk media memoria create representations and narratives of Harvey Milk. I focus on how these representations narratives are used over time in the construction, negotiation and maintenance of local, LGBTQIA+ and eventually a larger public memory of Harvey Milk. This project is a mix of history, memory, and media analysis. It is written as an overlapping chronology, so the reader can experience the mediated communication of Milk’s legacy as it moves forward through time. It is situated within the study of media and communication but is interdisciplinary in that it finds inspiration from memory studies, film and media studies, museum and exhibition studies, and public history – all areas in which communication with a public, and mediated communication, play integral parts of collective memory narrative building. Communicating Legacy: Media, Memory and Harvey Milk aspires to be a contribution toward a more comprehensive history of the memory of Milk. The project concludes with a summary of the core and layered Milk memory narratives, a look at the key memory keepers and institutional players in Milk memory maintenance, and a discussion of the future of Milk memory. Through a discussion of how media memoria communicate the legacy of Harvey Milk, the dissertation adds to scholarly knowledge about how collective memory of public figures is constructed in American culture. Additionally, the dissertation works toward resolving deficiencies in research addressing LGBTQIA+ collective memory studies. / Media & Communication

Public memory of "the Asylum" in contemporary American culture is communicated through a host of popular forms, including horror-themed entertainment such as haunted attractions. Such representations have drawn criticism from disability advocates on the basis that they perpetuate stereotypes and inaccurately represent the history of deinstitutionalization in the United States. In 2010, when Pennhurst State School and Hospital, a closed Pennsylvania institution that housed people understood as developmentally/intellectually disabled, was reused as a haunted attraction called "Pennhurst Asylum," it sparked a public debate and became an occasion for storytelling about what Pennhurst meant to the surrounding community. I apply theoretical perspectives from memory studies and disability studies to the case of "Pennhurst Asylum" in order to understand what is at stake when we remember institutional spaces such as Pennhurst. More specifically, this case study uses narrative analysis of news stories and reader letters, ethnographic observation at the haunted attraction, interviews with key storymakers, and historical/cultural contextualization to examine why this memory matters to disability advocates, former institutional residents and employees, journalists, and other community members. The narrative patterns I identify have ramifications for contemporary disability politics, the role of public communication in the formation of community memory, and scholarly debates over how to approach popular representations of historical trauma. I find that Pennhurst memory fits within contemporary patterns in the narrative, visual, and physical reuse of institutional spaces in the United States, which include redevelopment, memorialization, digital and crowd-sourced memory, amateur photography, Hollywood films, paranormal cable television shows, and tourism. Further, this reuse of institutional spaces has been an occasion for local journalists to take on the role of public historian in the absence of other available authorities. In this case study, the local newspaper (The Mercury) became a space where processes of commemoration could unfold through narrative--and, it created a record of this process that could inform future public history projects on institutionalization in the United States. In the terms of cultural geographer Kenneth Foote (1997), disability advocates attempted to achieve "sanctification" of the Pennhurst property by telling the story of its closure as a symbol of social progress that led to the community-based living movement. Paradoxically, since this version of the Pennhurst story relied on a narrow characterization of Pennhurst as a site of horrific abuse and neglect, it had this in common with the legend perpetuated by the haunted attraction. In contrast, other community members shared memories that showed Pennhurst had long been a symbol of the community's goodwill, service, and genuine caring. In short, public memory of Pennhurst in 2010 was controversial, in part, because the institution's closing in 1987 had itself been controversial. Many still believed it should never have been closed and were thus resistant to the idea of sanctifying its story as an example for future change. When the State abandoned the Pennhurst campus, it left an authority vacuum at a site about which there was still as much public curiosity as there had been when it first opened in 1908. Indeed, this easily claimed authority is part of what "Pennhurst Asylum" is selling. Its mix of fact and fiction offers visitors the pleasure of uncertainty and active detective work--something usually missing at traditional historic sites. Visitors get to touch a mostly unspecified, but nonetheless "real" past mediated by an abundance of historical and contemporary public communication that all attach an aura to Pennhurst as a place where horrific events happened. Rather than suggesting historical amnesia, the strategic fictionalizations made to create the Pennhurst legend show exactly what is remembered about "the Asylum." The legend distances the story away from American history and sets it in a deeper past beyond most living memory. From my observation at the haunted attraction, it appears that the problem isn't that the American public has forgotten "the Asylum"; it may be that we remember too well. Overall, the relationship between institutions and their communities is one of intractable complicity, ensuring that the public memory of "the Asylum" will continue to be deeply fraught. News archives show that for decades local newspapers reported on adverse events at Pennhurst including fire, disease outbreak, accidental death, violence, criminal activity, and a series of State and Federal probes into mismanagement and abuse. This is especially significant because the power structures that allowed the institution to function remain mostly intact. Indeed, the "Pennhurst Asylum" relies not only on our previous knowledge of Pennhurst and the mythic figure of "the Asylum;" it also relies on our fear of medical authority, bodily difference, and most of all, our collective vulnerability to the social mechanisms that continue to define and separate the "normal" and the "abnormal." Even among disability advocates, the act of remembering threatens to recreate the hierarchy of the institution. Some of the same people who had authority at Pennhurst continue to have the authority to tell its story today. Finally, the usefulness of the ghost story as a memory genre reflects both rapid change and surprising stagnation in the role of institutionalization in the United States. / Media & Communication

This thesis explores representations of the Holocaust in the Jewish Museum Berlin and the impact of commercialism on representational choices. Daniel Libeskind’s bold architectural design, which ultimately became the Jewish Museum Berlin, is in many ways a Holocaust memorial. By exploring curatorial strategies in regards to exhibition design and content, this thesis analyzes the debates within the Jewish Museum Berlin over the appropriate manner to represent the Holocaust to the museum-going public in contemporary Germany. This thesis argues that commercialism and the prospects of commercial viability played a significant role in curatorial decisions concerning exhibition narrative. Germany leads the world in acknowledging and exploring their past social crimes but, this thesis argues, an important opportunity for atonement was lost when the administration of the Jewish Museum Berlin privileged commercial success over the presentation of more difficult and uncomfortable, yet socially necessary, representations of the horror of the Holocaust.

This thesis explores representations of the Holocaust in the Jewish Museum Berlin and the impact of commercialism on representational choices. Daniel Libeskind’s bold architectural design, which ultimately became the Jewish Museum Berlin, is in many ways a Holocaust memorial. By exploring curatorial strategies in regards to exhibition design and content, this thesis analyzes the debates within the Jewish Museum Berlin over the appropriate manner to represent the Holocaust to the museum-going public in contemporary Germany. This thesis argues that commercialism and the prospects of commercial viability played a significant role in curatorial decisions concerning exhibition narrative. Germany leads the world in acknowledging and exploring their past social crimes but, this thesis argues, an important opportunity for atonement was lost when the administration of the Jewish Museum Berlin privileged commercial success over the presentation of more difficult and uncomfortable, yet socially necessary, representations of the horror of the Holocaust.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, post-Communist states had to interpret and portray their past in the context of post-Cold War politics. In the Czech Republic, reflections on the memory of communism have gone through peculiar waves that travel between indifference to anti-regime. The Museum of Communism serves as the only social institution that deals with such memory exclusively. Its goal is to create a simple and objective account of communism. However, with museums reinventing themselves as performative spaces that aim to empower their visitors, engage them emotionally and provide them an opportunity to (re)live a past they have not experienced first-hand, this thesis aims to identify what group identities the museum promotes, how it gives substance to them, and what kind of memory community it adheres to and fosters. Drawing on the rich literature on both memory studies and museum studies, this thesis examines the museum through lens of critical discourse analysis. It argues that the Museum of Communism ́s portrayal of the past maintains and participates in the pan-European discourse of the Czech Republic as a western nation kidnapped by the East and its victimhood status is defined by the global holocaust discourse.