Our Children
A Living Memory Archive
Our Children | আমাদের শিশু — A Living Memory Archive is a digital public-memory project examining what happens when a child-related tragedy becomes intensely visible in the social-media public sphere and then gradually recedes from collective attention
What happens to public memory when the feed moves on? The project also asks: Who remains remembered after intense digital visibility disappears, which questions survive the attention cycle, and what responsibility does a public-memory archive have when returning to stories involving vulnerable people?
Digital platforms can make a tragedy intensely public while also making public attention unusually temporary. Posts, reactions, explanations and demands for justice accumulate rapidly, but another event can soon displace them. Visibility is therefore not the same as memory. If remembrance is left entirely to the rhythms of the feed, vulnerable experiences may disappear or survive mainly through decontextualised and repeatedly circulated imagery. Our Children experiments with another form of digital remembrance: preserving questions, public responses and evidentiary context while reducing renewed exposure and representational harm. It treats return—not endless recirculation—as part of responsible public memory.
Historical traces and interpretation
Our Children | A Living Memory Archive
আমােদর িশশু | একিট জীবন্ত স্মৃিত-আকর্াইভ
Participant Dr Moiyen Zalal Chowdhury
Thematic group Digital Memory, Democracy, Misinformation & Representation
Historical traces and interpretation
Where and when the story is situated
The story is situated in Bangladesh in September 2026 and is primarily digital. It follows the online public life of one child-related episode as it moved through social media, news reporting and public discussion. Its focus is not only the event itself, but the digital public that formed around it: mourning, blame, justice claims, parenting and childhood discourse, social and moral diagnosis, and wider political or institutional interpretation.
Corpus 26 public source items; 12,150 comments and replies
Comment structure 11,091 main comments; 1,059 replies
Historical traces and interpretation
Main historical and digital sources
1. Digital-ethnography corpus
Apratim Digital Publics research archive: 26 public source items and 12,150 linked comments/replies. Raw identifiers and sensitive material are retained in a restricted research archive; the public project uses anonymised/paraphrased evidence.
2. The Business Standard, 19 Sep 2026
Historical traces and interpretation
Rights, ethics and publication
• Minors and family privacy: the submitted pilot episode does not reproduce identifying images of minors, private family photographs or graphic imagery.
• Ordinary social-media users: usernames and personal identifiers are not published; sensitive or readily searchable comments are paraphrased.
• Allegations: allegations and speculation are not presented as established facts. Reported claims are attributed and kept distinct from verified information.
Explore the original work
The embedded work is the contributor’s original media. Use the external link to view it directly on its hosting platform.
Sources & Credits
Original project references, visual sources and creator credits are collected here in one place.
- Creator & project
Dr Moiyen Zalal Chowdhury. Social-media storytelling project. Who Owns Memory? Digital Public Exhibition, First Cycle 2026.
1. Apratim Digital Publics digital-ethnography corpus — 26 public source items and 12,150 linked Facebook comments and replies, comprising 11,091 main comments and 1,059 replies. Automated/preliminary coding was used to identify patterns; selected evidence used in the public project was checked against original source context and anonymised/paraphrased where necessary. 2. The Business Standard, 19 September 2026, “Comilla University teacher's 13-yr-old son found dead in jungle a day after going missing.” 3. bdnews24.com, 19 September 2026, “A schoolboy went out to take photos. He never came home.” 4. bdnews24.com, 19 September 2026, “How Cumilla schoolboy’s body was found.” 5. The Business Standard, 20 September 2026, “Apratim murder: Family files case, no accused named.” 6. Contemporaneous public missing-child notices and public social-media posts/comments, used to reconstruct digital visibility and public response. Source URLs and contextual information are retained in the research evidence register. Social-media comments are treated as evidence of public discourse, not as evidence that commenters’ factual claims are true.
- Visual and media material
Photographs, documents, illustrations, video and audio are attributed through the project text, captions and contributor documentation wherever that information was supplied. This exhibition page does not grant additional reuse permissions.
- Digital exhibition edition
Web presentation adapted for Who Owns Memory? (2026), with layout and language editing. The original contributors retain authorship of their research, interpretation and creative work.