ABSTRACT
The chapter considers two University of Buenos Aires sites: the Ciencias Sociales (CS) campus and the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Filo). We document and analyze visual texts—signs and posters—at these public institutions leading up to the events at the Plaza de Mayo on March 24, 2016. Our analysis across the two sites reveals how commemorative literacies mobilized memory narratives during the 40th anniversary events to reflect an articulation of justice work as resistance. This articulation manifested in two themes: 1) resistance to state-level repression that linked the Macri government to the 1976 coup and impunity for the junta’s military leaders and 2) resistance to unjust economic policies and programs, both domestic and transnational. These two themes moved between the past and present in different ways, as the visual texts of resistance worked across the time of state terror (1976–1983) and other intervening historical events leading up to the 2016 commemorations. The deployment of the past to advocate for contemporary concerns over injustice highlights the complex dialectic between past and present.
