Shanghai Memory as a case study of ideological impact on storytelling: the interplay between memory, language, and stories

The research presented here builds on our earlier work on digital storytelling and how that has been used as part of the Shanghai Memory Project to give a voice to those usually unheard and to democratise the historical and cultural record (Burgess 2006, Guilliano 2022). This democratisation can be argued to be part of a social justice movement that challenges the mainstream discourse (Canella 2017) and the established historiography based on official archival records. We use this to develop a more robust digital humanities methodology to leverage the power of storytelling with digital tools as “counterpower” (Castells, 2011) to counteract the way in which the “dominant paradigms are established, reinforced and [importantly] resisted” (Canella 2017: 26).