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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digital nostalgia for communism mobilises bodies, emotions, and moral imaginaries online, producing affective polarisation through mediated memories, sensory registers, and claims to authenticity in post-socialist digital spaces.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how digital platforms mediate embodied forms of nostalgia for communism and how these affective practices contribute to moral and emotional polarisation in post-socialist societies. Drawing on digital ethnography of Romanian social media spaces, it analyses how the socialist past is not merely remembered but felt through sensory cues, emotional intensities, and bodily metaphors embedded in platformed interactions.

I argue that digital nostalgia operates as an embodied digital imaginary: memories of labour, food, discipline, and collective life are mobilised through affective registers that blur boundaries between past and present, proximity and distance, connection and alienation. Circulating within platform-specific infrastructures, these practices give rise to polarised affective communities, dividing users into morally charged positions of “those who remember correctly” and “those who do not,” sometimes along generational, political, and experiential lines.

By foregrounding bodies, emotions, and sensory language, the paper shows how digital infrastructures intensify affective attachments while simultaneously producing exclusion. Rather than framing digital nostalgia as either reactionary or emancipatory, the paper conceptualises it as an ambivalent site of (dis-)connection where longing, resentment, empathy, and hostility circulate together.