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This book examines the ways individuals in the US and Russia consume and construct collective memories of political events via a reestablished Cold War-like narrative in both media systems. The book contextualizes the rebirth of this phenomenon via seven political events involving Russia, examining the contemporary role of conscious media distrust in subconscious psychological processes.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Theoretical background
- Chapter 1: Group memory: Construction, reconstruction, and distortion
- Chapter 2: Collective memory, journalism, and news making
- Chapter 3: How the mind processes text, media news, and misinformation
- Chapter 4: Socio-cognitive approach to the construction of memory: At the intersection of media, memory, and the mind
- Part 2: Collective memory construction in Russian and U.S. media
- Chapter 5: Media, the mind and the reenactment of the enemy: Methodology
- Chapter 6: Takeover of Crimea
- Chapter 7: Conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the MH17 downing
- Chapter 8: Civil war in Syria and the 2016 U.S. elections
- Chapter 9: The 2014 Sochi Olympics and the 2018 poisoning of the Skripals
- Chapter 10: How the mind constructs a memory of recent political events
- Part 3: Reenacting the enemy in media and in the mind
- Chapter 11: Memory, media, and the mind: Revisiting the framework
- Conclusion
About the author
Ludmila Isurin is a professor at the Ohio State University. An interdisciplinary scholar whose research encompasses psycho- and sociolinguistics, social sciences and humanities with a recent focus on how collective memory is reflected in text and constructed in individual minds, she has written numerous chapters and journal articles, including an award-winning article in Language Learning. She has authored or coedited six books, including Collective Remembering.
Summary
This book examines the ways individuals in the US and Russia consume and construct collective memories of political events via a reestablished Cold War-like narrative in both media systems. The book contextualizes the rebirth of this phenomenon via seven political events involving Russia, examining the contemporary role of conscious media distrust in subconscious psychological processes.
Additional text
A brief review cannot do justice to the extraordinary depth of the interdisciplinary analysis of collective memory formation from media accounts in Russia and the US given in Reenacting the Enemy: Collective Memory Construction in Russian and US Memory. In this book, Ludmila Isurin considers three processes of collective memory construction, including the deliberate or subconscious reorientation of accepted historical facts, different interpretations of the causes of past conflicts, and the understanding of who should be blamed for these conflicts.
