Social Movements and the Challenges of Transnationalising Remembrance: Examining Media Literacy and Memory Work

The work of social movement organisations (SMOs) has remained under-examined in the burgeoning accounts of collective memory’s mediatised transcendence of the nation state (Kubal and Becerra 2014). The limited accounts that do exist tend to focus almost exclusively on instances of ‘successful’ memory-work where SMOs have managed to skillfully ‘scale up’ the remembrance of particular events beyond national frameworks, confounded state-level institutions, and achieved social and political justice through accessing transnational networks and forums and building transnational solidarities (see Conway 2010). The analytical neglect of negative case studies involving unsuccessful or only partially successful attempts at transnational memory-work has meant that constraints and inequalities characterising these emergent political fields have not been brought into focus. In particular, constraints and inequalities linked to vastly differing levels of media access and media literacy amongst social movement participants have been almost entirely invisible (see Constanza-Chock 2014). Quite tellingly, these analytical blind spots have also been accompanied by a lack of case studies from the global south. In this paper, I will seek to shine some light on these neglected issues through an examination of memory politics surrounding the Bhopal gas disaster. SMOs working in Bhopal have been seeking to develop a transnational remembrance for the disaster, foregrounding the continuing soil and groundwater contamination, and making transnational linkages with toxic disasters from other times and places (Bisht 2013). Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Bhopal (2010-2014), I will demonstrate how these SMOs have only been partially successful in their attempt at forging an environmentalism based transnational remembrance, examining in particular, their inability to stabilise a transnational memory narrative for their local participants. I will connect the constraints experienced by the SMOs to glaring inequalities in media literacy between movement leadership and the majority of movement participants. Overall, beyond addressing the specific areas of knowledge linked to SMOs identified above, the paper will respond to the broader demands for a shift away from an exclusive focus on the multi-directionality and connectivity of memory towards a concurrent examination of both opportunities and constraints in transnational memory-work (Rothberg 2011; Amine and Beschea-Fache 2012).