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Paper short abstract

The paper analyzes brief digital narratives that users share when reviewing Japanese gardens on Google Maps. Stories address issues of remains and survival of nature vis-à-vis the supernatural/non-natural catastrophe of war & atomic bombing. A hybrid genre emerges, combining multiple materialities.

Paper long abstract

The paper is part of a larger funded research that is dedicated to the study of descriptions and evaluations that users of the Google Maps Review platform upload and share in relation to the aftermaths of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki). The paper focuses on multimodal reviews that address outdoor public attractions, sites and scenes, by combining the fields of “platform studies” (from a media and communication approach; see Papacharissi, 2018; Plantin et al., 2018), with that of digital storytelling (from a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropology approaches). Specifically, platform studies sheds light on the ways digital stories and storytelling may be configured online, as well as on related issues of power-relations, as these are shapes by platforms’ design and affordances. In relation to digital storytelling, this paper adopts the “small stories” perspective (Georgakopoulou, 2017, 2022), which highlights how brief multimodal texts may be prolifically considered as stories.

The study examines simultaneously the materialities of both nature itself, and of the platforms through which digital narratives of the (super)natural can be publicly conveyed. It focuses on issues remains and survival in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whose natures have been devastated during WWII, specifically by nuclear bombing (with lasting radioactive consequences). Examining small stories shared by domestic and international visitors to Japanese gardens in these cities offers a unique genre of small stories.

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Paper short abstract

After WWII, countries that adopted socialism paired reconstruction with the idea of a “new man.” Its strongest realization was success in the struggle against nature’s forces. I will illustrate this through newspaper and literary narratives on youth labor brigades in the socialist Yugoslavia (SFRY).

Paper long abstract

In countries that, after World War II, proclaimed a socialist social order, economic and infrastructural reconstruction was closely tied to the idea of creating the “new socialist man.” This presentation focuses on one model of postwar reconstruction in the young Yugoslav state—the so-called Youth Labor Brigades. Thousands of young men and women not only built railways, highways, factories, and housing settlements, but also entered what was imagined as a “future in the present,” an ideal setting for the formation of socialist citizens. In other words, they were “tempered” not only through shock-work achievements and educational content, but also, equally importantly, through challenges of confronting natural forces and disasters. Political speeches, newspapers, and literary reviews reported on “heroic successes,” “superhuman efforts,” “exceptional creativity,” and “miracles” that brought into being what had previously seemed “unimaginable,” “insurmountable,” and “impossible.” “The river was ordered to move to the right, to give up part of its bed […]. The cliff was ordered to disappear from the horizon and it obeyed,” wrote one author. “They are like giants,” noted another. “We are changing nature, and we ourselves are changing,” declared a character in a 1947 feature film. Such accounts were the rule rather than the exception. These “victories in battles with nature” were intended to testify not only to the great achievements of postwar reconstruction, but also to the emergence of new, stronger, better prepared, and more complete people who were expected to lead the country toward a bright socialist future.

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Paper short abstract

Life stories of Greeks who were children during WWII reveal how forests and landscapes shaped survival, memory, and identity, forming “naturescapes” where personal and collective wartime experiences intertwine.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the life stories of Greeks who were children during the Second World War, focusing on their relationship with the natural world. These narratives act as cultural and historical testimonies, highlighting the interaction between personal experience and collective memory of the war. Central to the analysis is the concept of “naturescapes,” referring to both the symbolic and physical dimensions of nature in shaping remembrance. Forests are recalled as shelters from Nazi persecution and as vital sources of sustenance, while narrators sometimes anthropomorphize nature. The Pinios River, for example, is depicted as Saint Pinios, who drowned German troops and saved villagers, and domestic animals are remembered as companions who alleviated children’s loneliness.

The study explores two research questions: How is nature represented in personal narratives? And how does it contribute to the formation of memorial naturescapes, in a reworking of Appadurai’s term? Employing a qualitative methodology, the research applies secondary phenomenological narrative analysis to 28 life-story interviews preserved in the Life Stories Archive of the Department of Pedagogy and Primary Education at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Findings highlight how these narratives illuminate diverse childhood experiences of war while conceptualizing the natural world as both a place of survival and a symbolic arena where childhood identities are forged.

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Paper short abstract

At the Czech-Austrian border, the overgrowth of the former Iron Curtain within Podyjí National Park creates a “mnemonic ecology,” where ruins of guard posts, conservation practices, and human–nonhuman narratives intertwine, transforming dark heritage into a layered landscape of recovery.

Paper long abstract

Along the Czech-Austrian border, the remnants of the Iron Curtain are slowly vanishing under trees, shrubs, and moss, blending into the protected landscapes of Podyjí National Park. Yet in the stories told by local residents, former border guards, and park rangers, the traces of this once lethal barrier resurface in unexpected ways. The “green border” becomes a stage for memories that meander like the Dyje river itself—shifting between pain and nostalgia, mourning and renewal.

This paper explores how narratives of overgrown fences, ruined barracks, or rewilded shooting ranges intertwine with ecological processes of succession and conservation. What was once an infrastructure of surveillance and exclusion is retold as a landscape of biodiversity, tourism, and recovery. These layered stories reveal how human and non-human actors together shape a mnemonic ecology (Pieck), in which memories do not remain fixed in the past but transform alongside the changing environment. By attending to these storytelling practices, I show how the “greening” of the border is not only a natural process but also a narrative one: a way of healing, reimagining, and renegotiating the meaning of a contested landscape.