Human Centered

Challenging History Erasures to Expand Possible Futures

Episode Summary

Two-time CASBS fellow Fred Turner engages CASBS board of directors chair Abby Smith Rumsey before a live audience to discuss her new book "Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History." When the erasure or distortion of collective memory through storytelling hijacks fact, truth, and history itself, what kind of information infrastructures can effectively confront those false narratives? Turner and Rumsey explore the tensions between history and storytelling and resulting implications for political beliefs, actions, and our collective sense of reality.

Episode Notes

Two-time CASBS fellow Fred Turner engages CASBS board of directors chair Abby Smith Rumsey before a live audience to discuss her new book "Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History." When the erasure or distortion of collective memory through storytelling hijacks fact, truth, and history itself, what kind of information infrastructures can effectively confront those false narratives? Turner and Rumsey explore the tensions between history and storytelling and resulting implications for political beliefs, actions, and our collective sense of reality.

ABBY SMITH RUMSEY

CASBS website bio | Personal website | Talk at Long Now Foundation in partnership with CASBS 

MIT Press web page for Memory, Edited: Taking Liberties with History

CASBS Q&A with Rumsey (2022)


FRED TURNER

Stanford University profile | Fred Turner's books |  on Google Scholar |

"Machine Politics: The Rise of the Internet and a New Age of Authoritarianism," Harper's Magazine (2019)