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Social Justice, the Right to Memory and Communication Ethics: Shaping a Just Memory Culture in the Digital Age — An Interview with Anna Reading and Noam Tirosh
LI Andong
Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication ›› 2025, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (7) : 158-176.
PDF(1546 KB)
PDF(1546 KB)
Social Justice, the Right to Memory and Communication Ethics: Shaping a Just Memory Culture in the Digital Age — An Interview with Anna Reading and Noam Tirosh
The right to memory refers to the rights of individuals and collectives to tell the public about past experiences or historical narratives in their own way. With the development of this concept in English-speaking scholarship, the notion of the right to memory has begun to encompass a range of related obligations, principles, interventions and social practices. Media and communication have emerged as key areas of inquiry in the study of the right to memory. Emerging digital platforms not only offer new opportunities to safeguard this right but also introduce new inequalities and blind spots. By considering the different facets of collective and individual memory, the right to memory seeks to safeguard all aspects of memory processes through a right-oriented discourse that respects the plurality of memory narratives and promotes the free expression and dialogue between different memory stories. In terms of media and communication, at the practical level, the right to memory provides memory activists with discursive resources for mediated action. At the official level, it calls for media policies and regulations to protect the media accessibility of disadvantaged groups. At the conceptual level, it advocates a communication ethic of tolerance, openness and mutual respect.
Right to memory / right to communicate / right to be forgotten / communication ethics / media memory
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Interpretations and memorialisations of China's long history, in service of political aspirations of the present and towards the future, have long attracted scholarly attention. This special issue addresses how the curation, performance, and consumption of collective memory provide valuable insight into the interplay between the reconstruction of Chinese identity, cultural modernisation, and the shifting role of heritage and memory in Chinese domestic and international politics. Touching on issues around diversity in, for instance, personal/collective memory or community-based/state-led heritage, we consider how state–society relations inform local memory practices. Furthermore, the articles enclosed discuss pertinent and far-reaching impacts of China's cultural-material changes, transformations, and destructions in service of memory re-formation. Investigating the politicisation of heritage and the material solidification of strategically selected representations of the past, we consider how the notion of “memory infrastructure” contributes to an academic understanding of the interaction between history, memory, and politics.
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Implicated within the relationship between memory and identities at the local, national and international levels is the question of whether there is ‘right to memory’: the human right to have the otherness of the past acknowledged through the creation of symbolic and cultural acts, utterances and expressions. This article outlines the rationale for a right to memory and why the debate is of importance to memory and cultural studies. It outlines some of the relationships understood between memory and identity within memory studies, suggesting that a right to memory requires an understanding of the complex dynamics of memory and identities not only within, but internationally across, borders. It extends the concept of political cosmopolitanism to use as an analytical framework to enable an analysis of current international protocols, showing how they formulate the discursive relationship between identity and memory in four ways that involve a number of contradictions and unresolved tensions.
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Can a right to memory be counted among the rights society needs to safeguard, if so, what are its theoretical and conceptual foundations, and how do they relate to communications? We answer these questions by offering a new perspective regarding the right’s components, origin and justifications, the mechanisms needed to realize it and the legal framework required for such realization. We begin by first recognizing the fundamental role of memory in human life, in particular as it pertains to the creation, preservation, and endowment of identity, which justifies the need to protect it. We then discuss memory’s four elements—remembering, forgetting, being remembered, and being forgotten—and their dependence on communications. We follow by describing the nature of rights and the distinction between different types of rights. This helps us claim that recognizing the right to memory requires ensuring the capability to communicate by designing appropriate communication policies.
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1. “原生记忆建构”主要指各地原住民的记忆实践和他们对记忆本体论、认识论的不同理解，例如后文中澳大利亚原住民的“歌行路线”。
2. “神经多样性”指人脑和认知的多样性。这种观点认为人们的认知和共情能力存在先天差异，应当尊重这种差异、为神经多样性人群提供社会支持和包容的社会氛围，而不是笼统地建构“正常-非正常”的病理式二元对立。
3. 国际良知站点联盟（ICSC）是一个由正义和人权相关的历史遗址、博物馆和纪念馆所结成的全球性网络。该联盟成立于1999年，是国际博物馆协会（International Council of Museums）的附属组织，致力于以人类历史的经验教训促进和保护人权。联盟官方网站：
4. 麦克布莱德报告，即《多种声音，一个世界》。
5. “慢记忆”研究项目官方网站：
6. 此处和下文的“超越人类的世界”有两个含义：其一是指自然环境，这种表述挑战了自然与文化（nature versus culture）的二分，提醒我们人类社会也处在自然环境中；其二是被视作不正常或者非常规的神经多样性社会行为，例如孤独症人群，他们的行为和思维模式往往不被包含在理想的社会性和人性观念之中。
7. 此处的“记忆权”为right to remember，区别于广义的记忆权right to memory或memory rights。
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