What’s at Stake?

Various manifestations of popular culture, such as prose and poetry, popular music, cinema, comic books, and murals – along with the different platforms where these cultural products are created, mediated, and consumed – transmit stories about the past and equip it with colors, sounds, and protagonists, opening up questions about the sonic, visual, tactile, and inter and transmedial modalities of memory infrastructures. MEMPOP is dedicated to unpacking the mnemonic mechanisms at work in contemporary popular culture.

Based at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and University of Rijeka (Croatia), MEMPOP zooms in on Croatia and Slovenia, where, as well as in the neighbouring countries, the institutionalized memorialization of the past (World War Two, communism, the wars of Yugoslav dissolution) seeks to impose hegemonic narratives created by the political elites, whereas the broad spectrum of popular-cultural products challenge as well as reinforce those narratives. MEMPOP is an interdisciplinary research project designed to study the mnemonic aesthetics and strategies of popular culture, and how this memory work from below interacts with the institutionalized memoryscape, from an intermedial and transmedial perspective.

The project, funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency and the Croatian Science Foundation, brings together an interdisciplinary team of early-, mid-career and senior scholars to offer a nuanced understanding of memory aesthetics, strategies, and dynamics in contemporary popular culture.