What do we mean by 'cultural memory'?

In our project, the notion of 'cultural memory' is providing us with a way of thinking about what we see as the traces of the past in the present. More than being another way of saying 'the act of remembering culture', 'cultural memory' refers to a series of ideas in cultural studies and elsewhere that consider the tensions between collective and individual ways of imagining the past in our contemporary experience, and how this connects with identity in both cases. Another way of saying this is that 'cultural memory' is concerned with the relationships between the public and the private stories that we tell about the past.

What do we mean by 'popular music'?

While at first glance, what we mean by 'popular music' might seem to be quite straightforward and self-explanatory (it's music that's popular, right?), there has been considerable discussion in academic circles about what actually constitutes 'popular music'.

Here are a few different ways that the term might be defined (but not all of them...) and some of the problems with these definitions: