Deadline for submissions: 3 November 2025
East European Politics and Societies invites submissions for a special cluster on the topic of: The Past Reimagined: Media and Memory in Post-Communist Countries
Guest Editor – Dr. Jonila Godole, Associate Professor, Department of Journalism and Communication, University of Tirana, [email protected]
Dr. Jonila Godole is Associate Professor of Journalism and Communication at the University of Tirana and Executive Director of the Institute for Democracy, Media and Culture (IDMC). Her research and civic work focus on youth civic engagement, political communication, and post-authoritarian memory cultures. She has led multiple international projects on media transformation and historical memory in Albania and the Western Balkans. She recently directed Media and Memory (IDMC, 2025), a major empirical study of mediated historical narratives and digital memory in Albanian society (https://www.idmc.al/en/media/files/IDMC-media-and-memory.pdf).
Guest Editor- Dr. Cynthia Horne, Professor, Department of Political Science, Western Washington University, [email protected]
Dr. Cynthia M. Horne is Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University. Her research includes work on transitional justice, democratization and memory politics in the post-communist region. Her books Building Trust and Democracy: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Countries (Oxford 2017) and Transitional Justice and the Former Soviet Union: Reviewing the Past, Looking Toward the Future (with Lavinia Stan- Cambridge 2019) engage these research issues. She is an associate editor for East European Politics & Societies and Women’s Studies International Forum. Recently she was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Corvinus University of Budapest (2024) and visiting researcher in the Balkans (2025).
Topic Summary
For this thematic cluster, we invite original scholarly contributions that explore how the media affects the way people in post-communist societies engage with, remember, or act on the past. This topic is more important than ever as media ecosystems are increasingly polarized and politicized, contributing to societal and generational divisions over remembrance of the past. Moreover, the media can be wielded as a tool of populist politics in Central and Eastern Europe, amplifying memory wars and authoritarian nostalgia for potential political advantage.
We welcome contributions that engage how different sources of information, such as social media, digital media, print media, and/or broadcast media, might differently impact perceptions of the past. We are especially interested in submissions engaging the impact of the digitization and polarization of the media on attitudes toward the communist past. Attention to potential cleavages by age, ethnicity, region, or other demographic dimensions is encouraged. We are especially curious about how youth media engagement, often in the form of social media and digital media, shapes their attitudes about communism and in turn impacts the politics of the present.
Thematic Rationale
Across post-communist Europe powerful transformations have redefined how societies relate to the past. First, there has been a profound demographic shift: a full generation has now come of age—and is raising children—without any direct experience or inherited memory of dictatorship (Mrozik and Holubec, 2018; Petkov, 2023). For many, the past is no longer a lived trauma but a story mediated and shaped more by digital and social media than school curriculum or family testimonies (Mironescu, 2021; Petrescu and Petrescu, 2025). This can create conditions where different demographic cohorts remember and relate to the same past differently (Erll, 2017; Mihelj, 2017).
Second, the media landscape has undergone rapid digital fragmentation. While the fall of state-controlled media once promised pluralism, the rise of social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook has produced a different kind of information environment shaping memory politics —one driven by virality, aesthetics, and algorithmic visibility (Meyen and Pfaff-Rüdiger, 2014; Gjuričová, 2021). On social and digital media platforms, today’s memory is curated byinfluencers and user-generated content, often promoting a type of digital nostalgia that is detached from historical verification (Boym, 2011; Bardan, 2020). Moreover, highly polarized media sources mean people often do not engage in content contrary to their preconceived opinions about the past (Hoskins, 2018).
This thematic cluster invites contributions that critically examine how traditional and social media outlets in post-communist states in Central and Eastern Europe engage with, reinterpret, and often mythologize the past. This topic is important for democratic cohesion in post-communist countries today, as fragmented memory ecologies potentially undermine historical literacy and facilitate populist politics (Szostak and Mihelj, 2017; Dobek-Ostrowska, 2015). While scholars have studied the interaction of media and memory in post-communism, this thematic cluster seeks to capture the latest developments in a field, the positive re-evaluation of communism brought about by the democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the rise of populist influencers, journalists and media owners who promote a nostalgic post-memory of past times.
In addition to earlier foundational studies (Zelizer, 2008; Boym, 2001; Landsberg 2004), recent scholarship has underscored how digital and social media reconfigure the circulation and contestation of memory narratives in post-communist contexts. For example, Kelpšienė et al. (2022) provide an integrative review of how difficult heritage is negotiated on social networking sites, highlighting the ways these platforms can simultaneously trivialize, politicize, or commercialize collective remembrance. Kaufmann and Palmberger (2022) illustrate how everyday engagements with memory increasingly combine online and offline environments. Rutten, Fedor, and Zvereva (2013) examine how new media forms and providers facilitate the emergence of competing narratives and “web wars” over the interpretation of the communist and post-communist past. Together, these contributions emphasize the importance of analyzing participatory content production, platform logics, and affective communities in the mediation of historical memory. Submissions should engage and build on these scholarly tracks.
Manuscript submission guidelines:
We invite submissions that explore how the media affects the way people in post-communist societies engage with the communist and other contested pasts. In particular, we seek to understand the impact of the digitization, personalization and polarization of the media on attitudes toward the past. We are open to single and comparative country cases across Central and Eastern Europe. Relevant topics might include:
- Youth and intergenerational reinterpretations of socialism, dictatorship, and political transition via platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, or other social and digital media
- Restorative nostalgia, affective engagement, and disinformation related to digital memory cultures
- Media literacy as it relates to civic apathy and political disengagement among specific demographic groups and generations
- Journalism, archives and the (in)visibility of transitional justice in public discourse
- The role of the media in shaping or distorting the past to advance politics in the present, including the emergence of competing narratives over memory
We are open to a broad array of research methods and approaches, reflecting the diverse historical, political, and media contexts across Central and Eastern Europe. Theoretically informed qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods studies are appreciated. Interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary perspectives are welcomed. Manuscripts must meaningfully engage the relevant literature on the topic of the media and remembrance of the past in order to be considered. Especially encouraged are papers examining Western Balkan countries that are on the margins of the EU, facing delayed accession, democratic stagnation, or post-conflict memory politics. Manuscripts must be original and not direct translations of pieces already published elsewhere.
We envision a thematic cluster consisting of six to eight quality manuscripts. For consideration, authors should send an abstract to the two guest editors; EEPS will invite the authors of the most promising abstracts to develop them into full research articles. Abstracts should include a tentative title, a 500-word description, and a 200-word short bio including full name, affiliation and email address. The project description should present a clear theoretical rationale and research methodology.
Proposed timetable:
November 3, 2025 – Submission of abstracts (a title, a 500-word description, and a 200-word short bio); please email to [email protected] and [email protected].
December 2, 2025 – Selection of abstracts and response to authors
September 2026 – Submission of complete manuscripts (up to 9,000 words, using endnotes)
September – January 2027 – Peer reviews and revisions
Early 2027 – Publication
