Subversive memory work: Reworking journalism and its digital archives to contest dominant memory regimes

Media scholarship has long established journalism as a form of memory work. Yet conventional journalistic practices, particularly elite-centered sourcing and dominant news values, privilege certain actors and experiences while marginalizing others, producing dominant memory regimes. Drawing on a qualitative case study of the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), this study examines how dominant memory regimes can be contested from within journalism. It develops subversive memory work as a conceptual framework organized around two domains of mnemonic power, production and access. The framework identifies four interrelated dimensions, namely everyday witnessing, structural witnessing, cultural witnessing, and accessible counter-memory infrastructure. Together, these dimensions capture journalistic and archival practices that bring the lives, experiences, and forms of knowledge of ordinary people and historically marginalized communities into the journalistic record and make them available for future access. The study argues that subversive memory work contests dominant memory regimes by reworking both journalistic production and archiving practices.