The Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) is an oral history based, research, advocacy and archival centre located at the University of Cape Town. We record and disseminate peoples’ stories to expand the democratizing possibilities of public history. The CPM trains students and organizations in oral/ visual history research, theory and forms of public representation; and runs a publicly accessible multi-lingual archive that contains over 3000 hours of audio and video.

Scholars and practitioners alike have framed the cultural and political transformations in Eastern Europe in terms of a ‘transition paradigm,’ as a passage from totalitarianism toward a horizon marked by the practices of modern liberal democracy. The Cambridge MAW team seeks to advance the state of the art by developing a ‘memory paradigm’ that casts the variety of these transformations as differential responses to legacies and traumas of the imperial, Soviet, and national pasts. In real time (2010-2013), the project explores the dynamics of cultural forms of memory and the interactions of these forms inside and across Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. It offers a new metric for measuring the profound changes that these countries have undergone since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and attempts to come to grips with the hidden obstacles populating the cultural field that can obstruct further and deeper changes.

Does the medium make the memory? Within the cross-disciplinary field of cultural memory studies this programme focuses on the role played by different media (texts, images, monuments etc) in the evolution and maintenance of ‘memory sites.’ Through a series of interlinked case-studies it examines the interaction of different mnemonic practices over time, the influence of innovations within the media landscape on such practices, and their role in the shaping of social memory.