While printed or hand-written life-writing can be treated as a resource to learn about memory and remembrance practices, their forms and narrativizations, the analysis of its platformised counterpart provides a valuable insight into how platforms influence our remembering practices and writing about them. The recollection is not only social, i.e., taking place within ‘collective frameworks’ (Halbwachs), but also, on a broader scale, takes place within networks of actors, human and nonhuman. Since “[…] any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor […]” (Latour), platforms and algorithms, which alter or influence our remembering, can fairly be described as taking part, being actors, in our personal and collective remembrance practices as well. In this project, I follow an approach of fellow autobiography scholars, who treat life-writing practices as a source of learning about individuals’ remembering and changes in it (Rasch). Inspired by Varoufakis’s observations on human behaviour modification in the cloud capital age, I draw attention to how the materiality of memory and remembering is being changed across seemingly immaterial platforms. To do this, I analyse the material objects’ functions in platformised migration-life-writing of home.
Research questions: What functions do objects perform in the platformised migration-life-writing of home? And how do these functions reflect the dynamics of memory and remembering’s (im)materialities in literature?
Building on actor-network theory (ANT) and object-oriented narratology (OON), I follow a functional approach to material objects in literature and propose an addition to OON, which will allow us to analyse functions of objects in platformised life-writing. This project contributes to the fields of memory and materiality studies, while also, through the functional approach, underlines the interrelationality of human and nonhuman in literary texts.
The corpus consists of platformised migration-life-writing as well as fictional texts with biographical details, dealing with the topics of home and (non-)belonging, where the human-nonhuman entanglement is rendered meaningful and is given special attention by the author. I analyse Tatsiana Zamirovskaya’s (b. 1980) and Valzhyna Mort’s (b. 1981) writing across platforms (LiveJournal, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram) in the timeframe of 2010-2024 and turn to some of their prosaic and poetic works as well. Born in Belarus, they have been living in the USA for approximately 10 and 20 years, respectively.
Publications from the project
- “Mediale Zwischenwelt. LiveJournal als Refugium für belarussische Stimmen,” Osteuropa 1-3 (2025): 459-462, https://zeitschrift-osteuropa.de/hefte/2025/1-3/mediale-zwischenwelt/.