Studying Social Memories: A Talk with Professor Allan Martell
By Maggie McDonald
According to Professor Allan Martell, the ways we think and feel about the past inform our individual and collective behaviors towards the present and the future. Information plays a pivotal role in the articulation, circulation, and social negotiation of memories violence such as armed conflicts, dictatorships, or genocides.
On January 12, 2024, Martell presented a talk focused on the role of information objects as dissimilar as personal records, commemorations, and memorial exhibitions in shaping how such memories are negotiated. Titled “Towards an Information Science Approach to the Study of Social Memories of Violence”, the talk focused on two case studies: one about the role of personal records in documenting the memories of service of U.S. military veterans, and another about the role of information infrastructures in shaping the memories of the armed conflict of the 1980s in El Salvador. Martell also discussed future work that centers on other types of information objects. Finally, he argued that studying memory from the rich trans-disciplinarity of the information field can provide useful tools for cultural heritage professionals devoted to promoting more empathetic, critical, and justice-oriented ways of relating to violent pasts.
Allan A. Martell is an assistant professor at the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research interests center on social memories of violence, memory activism, personal documentation, human rights archives, and design justice. In his work, Martell explores how societies negotiate social memories of violence, the role of information curation in shaping such memories, and possible frameworks to promote more critical, nuanced memories. His research has been published in the Memory Studies and Archivaria journals as well as the edited volume “Historical Memory and Sociocultural Transformation in El Salvador” (University of El Salvador 2023). A forthcoming article about the documentary practices of U.S. military veterans will appear in Archival Science.
Martell holds a Ph.D. in Information from the School of Information at the University of Michigan, an M.S. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Social Communications from the Central American University (El Salvador). Before joining the faculty at Indiana University, Martell was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University.