This article explores the strategic (mis)use of historical memory by populist political actors, focusing on George Simion, leader of the Romanian radical-right party Alliance for the Unity of Romanians. Through a detailed case study of the Valea Uzului Cemetery controversy, the research examines how populist movements construct and disseminate exclusionary historical narratives to mobilize affective publics, reinforce nationalistic ideologies, and generate political support. Drawing on qualitative analysis of Facebook comments and posts, the study investigates how memory is weaponized to polarize public opinion and elevate a simplified, antagonistic vision of history. The Valea Uzului case exemplifies how war cemeteries and commemorative practices can be transformed into symbolic battlegrounds for political gain. The digital environment serves as a key vector for radicalization, emotional amplification, and narrative reinforcement. Ultimately, this research highlights the critical role of memory in populist politics and the power of social media in shaping historical perception. It calls for further comparative investigation into how such mnemonic strategies impact democratic processes, interethnic relations, and the broader politics of remembrance in contemporary Europe.

This special issue analyses how formal independence from colonial rule has impacted institutions and epistemologies of history writing in different parts of the world after 1945. The integrated collection of articles focuses on the transitions and ruptures of knowledge production taking place in the wake of states gaining their formal independence. It explores how different types of decolonisation led to different engagements with history writing, and by doing so we provide fresh perspectives on processes of knowledge decolonisation. In this introduction we situate the special issue in two bodies of literature: firstly, decolonial and postcolonial debates about history and epistemology, and secondly, the literature on the decolonisation process with a specific focus on memory and commemoration. We argue that a fuller understanding of the similarities and differences between knowledge decolonisation then and now requires solid historical contextualisation of the mid-century ideas and vocabularies.

There is today a growing variety of types of memory mediations that often go further than memorialisation and heritage-building. Comics are undoubtedly part of this movement as their verbal-visual storytelling form tends to prompt layered responses from reader-viewers. Reader-viewers find themselves surprised, moved, and transformed by that reading experience. In this article, we take as a case study a comic page laying out the impact of agriculture’s industrial organisation in France shared by Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings) and its sister organisation, the Bassines Non Merci collective. It is a good example to address our central questions of how multimodal languages such as this one-page comic facilitate the process of transformative learning and how such multimodal forms allow one to move from memory-making, crystallising a specific event, to an amplification of engagement that leads to collective action. In short, it allows us to study the specific mechanisms and affordances that multimodal modes of communication, such as comics, possess as tools for transformative learning. In the first section of the article, we investigate the different types of relational engagement that can lead to transformative learning in comics. The second section focusses more specifically on emotions and their role in transformative learning. Finally, we look at the specific comics mechanisms that support transformative learning. Specifically, we look at how comics create a disjunction, give meaning to that disjunction, and help reader-viewers practise real or imaginary resolution that impact identity formation.

This article proposes a definition of the concept of postcolonial justice in view of elaborating a fruitful theoretical framework for connecting distinct demands for racial, cultural, epistemic, memorial, and spatial justice that have been emerging on a global scale in the last two decades. The article conceives postcolonial justice as both critical and reparative, maintaining that reparation claims must be considered a crucial pillar in a theory of postcolonial justice. It also argues that postcolonial justice is better understood as a complement to a radically egalitarian conception of global social justice, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. Finally, it concludes that while reparations are relevant for an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial theory of global social justice, the reparative grammar of postcolonial justice is not sufficient to target current distributive inequalities that depend on existing infrastructures of domination. The latter cannot be repaired and should instead be abolished.

Contestation over war memorialization can help democratic theory respond to the current attenuation of citizenship in war in liberal democratic states, especially the United States. As war involves more advanced technologies and fewer soldiers, the relation of citizenship to war changes. In this context war memorialization plays a particular role in refiguring the relation. Current practices of remembering and memorializing war in contemporary neoliberal states respond to a dilemma: the state needs to justify and garner support for continual wars while distancing citizenship from participation. The result is a consumer culture of memorialization that seeks to effect a unity of the political community while it fights wars with few citizens and devalues the public. Neoliberal wars fought with few soldiers and an economic logic reveals the vulnerability to otherness that leads to more active and critical democratic citizenship.

Autobiographical memory (AM) dysfunction has been proposed as a neurocognitive mechanism underlying the development and maintenance of depression. However, case–control neuroimaging studies investigating the neural correlates of AM in depression have yielded inconsistent findings. The present study utilized neuroimaging meta-analyses to identify robust neural markers of AM dysfunction in depression and characterize the associated behavioral and network-level mechanisms. A preregistered neuroimaging meta-analysis (https://osf.io/35xtf) was conducted, incorporating data from 341 patients with unipolar depression, 82 individuals at risk of depression, and 261 healthy controls across case–control functional magnetic resonance imaging studies examining AM processing. Meta-analytic network-level and behavioral decoding analyses were performed to aid interpretation of the findings. Compared with controls, the depression group displayed increased activation in the right paracingulate cortex (dorsal anterior cingulate [dACC]) and precuneus, and decreased activation in the anterior insula during AM recall. Exploratory valence-specific analyses revealed that negative AM recall was associated with increased activity the dACC and precuneus. Meta-analytic decoding linked the dACC to the salience network and to domains related to negative affect and executive control, while the precuneus was associated with the default mode network and with processes related to social cognition and AM. Findings do not support prevailing models emphasizing altered amygdala and hippocampal function in AM deficits in depression. Instead, they highlight the involvement of core regions within the salience and default mode networks as key neural substrates of AM dysfunction. These regions may contribute to affective, social-cognitive, and mnemonic disturbances that shape the valence-specific nature of AM deficits in depression.

Both armed groups and civilians have evoked historical memory in the Katiba Macina and Boko Haram related conflicts. Although not a cause of the conflicts, historical memory informs the perceptions and choices of both fighters and civilians. Based on interviews with members of the armed groups and local civilians, the authors demonstrate that how an individual perceives their own positionality within society and how they perceive their ancestors’ positionality affects how that person reacted to the armed groups’ evocation of historical memory, how they interpreted the source of greater threat, and their own self-protection strategies.

Memory for emotional information is greater than for non-emotional information and is enhanced by sleep-related consolidation. Previous studies have focused on emotional arousal and valence of established stimuli, but what is the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotional information? Figurative expressions, which are pervasive in everyday communication, are often rated as higher in emotionality than their literal counterparts, but the effect of emotionality on the learning of metaphors, and the effect of sleep on newly acquired emotionally negative, positive and neutral language, is as yet poorly understood. In this study, participants were asked to memorise conventional (e.g. ‘sunny disposition’) and novel (e.g. ‘cloudy disposition’) metaphorical word pairs varying in valence, accompanied by their definitions. After a 12-hour period of sleep or wake, participants were tested on their recognition of word pairs and recall of definitions. We found higher arousal ratings were related to increased recognition and recall performance. Furthermore, sleep increased the accurate recognition of all word pairs compared to wake but also reduced the valence of word pairs. The results indicate better memory for newly acquired emotional stimuli, a benefit of sleep for memory, but also a reduction in emotional arousal as a consequence of sleep consolidation.