Difficult heritage on social network sites: An integrative review

Abstract

Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested and dissonant heritage, on the heritage of excluded and subaltern groups, and on the heritage of collective traumatic past events. Situated at the intersection between heritage studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, social media studies and digital heritage studies, a growing body of scholarly literature has been emerging in the past 10 years, addressing online communication practices on SNS. This study, an integrative review of a comprehensive corpus of 80 scholarly works about difficult heritage on SNS, identifies the profile of authors contributing to this emerging area of research, the increasing frequency of publication after 2017, the prevalence of qualitative research methods, the global geographic dispersion of heritage addressed, and the emergence of common themes and concepts derived mostly from the authors ‘home’ fields of memory studies, heritage studies and (digital) media studies.