Nostalgic Design: Making Memories in the Rhetoric Classroom

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to be literate in contemporary rhetorics of nostalgia? How can such knowledge lead to a better-designed world? From scrutinizing digital technologies of longing like Facebook’s On This Day to pursuing Afrofuturistic traditions toward neostalgic tomorrows, this essay surveys the human need to bathe in lost pasts, how such longing is coded into our lives, and how it can be activated by rhetoric students to design equitable futures. In doing so, I propose five tenets of nostalgic design, a making-centric approach to the rhetoric of memory that (1) interrogates technologies of nostalgia, (2) learns from user longings, (3) urges solidarity across a design’s lifespan, (4) fragments isolated traditions, and (5) surveys the past for lost futures. Within each movement, I both introduce defining features of the rhetoric of nostalgia and assignments that aid students in remaking the memory systems around them.

KEYWORDS:

• Design
• memory
• nostalgia
• pedagogy
• technology

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Editor Jacqueline Rhodes and the three anonymous readers of this article for giving so much invaluable feedback. Thank you also to my 2020 OU memory studies class, without whom this essay would be impossible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The University of Oklahoma is a primarily white institution in a state, as seen below, with a deep colonialist past. My class of 15 contained multiple students who identified as Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and queer. Given a different makeup perhaps they would’ve been less comfortable challenging dominant nostalgias.

² A review of 40 rhetoric journals and presses reveals 23 nostalgia-centric publications (as opposed to brief mentions of nostalgia). A running bibliography of publications on the rhetoric of nostalgia can be found at: wkurlinkus.com/wkurlinkus_nostalgialist.html.

³ Jonathan Carter similarly writes of content discouraged by Facebook’s “Time Well Spent” campaign: “Facebook’s code was refigured to reorganize actants in networked relation with Facebook under TWS, rendering users and content incompatible with the retained nostalgia unintelligible within the network. Shocked by the absence of information on Facebook after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Zeynep Tufekci documents how algorithmic processes on the network limited access to issues of civic concern (205)” (554).

⁴ Upon reading about this looped affect, many of my students turned off Facebook notifications on their cellphones.

⁵ Over the last three years I’ve interviewed numerous On This Day users and archived and taxonomized hundreds of On This Day posts.

⁶ The American Public Transportation Association reports that 60% of public transportation riders are people of color; 55% are women  (Clark).