Politics of the Past: Understanding the Role of Memory, Postmemory, and Remembrance in Navigating the History of Migrant Families

The importance of history as an HCI method has been gaining increasing attention in HCI literature. However, the mainstream historical sources (books, documentaries, etc.) and methods often risk (re)producing western colonial biases potentially providing a narrow one-sided perspective on history and detaching “sanitized facts” from people’s emotional accounts. While oral history and similar alternative methods are often used as a countermeasure, their applicability has remained underexplored in HCI, especially in a sensitive context, such as migration. We build on the rich body of social science work on collective memory to introduce a complementary way of navigating the past of the migrant families, and also reveal the corresponding challenges to advance this literature. Our interview study with 17 migrant families highlights how the politics of remembrance, family dynamics, and postmemory shape the past stories of migrant families. We discuss how these findings inform the HCI literature on migration, design, and postcolonial computing.