Young People, Media, and Nostalgia

This book explores how Latin American young people engage with nostalgia and grasp a sense of nostalgic representations of the 1970s and 1980s through contemporary media. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Costa Rica, this book analyses how young audiences make sense of nostalgic representations of transnational pasts, thus creating a link between media reception practices and the engagement with broader social, cultural, economic, and political structures. It also brings to the fore new insights concerning the role media has in fostering senses of national memory by highlighting the key role of everyday media engagements in comprehending the past. This comprehensive empirical study will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of media and communications studies, Latin American studies, sociology, digital culture, memory studies, social and cultural anthropology, youth studies, cultural studies, and readers interested in popular culture, television, and cinema.

Rodrigo Muñoz-González is lecturer at the School of Communication of the University of Costa Rica. He holds a PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

1. Back in Time 2. From Memory to Nostalgia 3. Making Sense of Nostalgia 4. Imagining the Past: Idealisations and Ambivalences 5. Per Aspera Ad Adstra 6. Charming Pasts and Impossible Futures 7. Nostalgia as Structure of Feeling 8. Epilogue: A Meditation on Homecomings Appendix: Research Design