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Abstract The story of memory studies has been told as a tale of booms and waves. Most recently, a fourth wave of memory studies, responding to the environmental, ecocritical and post-humanist turn in the humanities, has been heralded (Craps et al., 2018). This Special Issue aims to trace and reflect upon the developments that have led to this fourth phase. At the outset, however, it needs to be acknowledged that we consider how memory and different forms of environment have long been understood as interrelated. Firstly, environments have featured as metaphors to focus attention on contexts of different kinds that are pertinent to acts of remembering. Secondly, environments have been considered as the background settings for memory processes: the places in which memory work is done. Thirdly, environments have been considered a functional parts of memory processes – where an environment serves as a media carrier of memory content that is actively involved in the transmission process. Although we chart how significant recent shifts in dominant modes of defining the term “environment” have impacted the field of memory studies and contributed to developments that have been construed as a fourth wave of memory studies, we argue that such a the fourth wave of memory studies does not represent a paradigmatic shift in our understanding of the relationship between memory and environment, but rather a shift in emphasis. As we move from memory place to mnemonic space to planetary memory (Bond et al., 2017; Chakrabarty & Latour, 2021; Crownshaw, 2014), the most significant shifts in our understanding of memory pertain to epistemology, category and scale. These altered frames of perception invite us to understand memory and environment as embedded, co-constitutive and co-constructed. Whilst there has been a consensus within the field of memory studies that only humans have the ability to “remember in ways that link individual remembering to cultural frameworks” (Kansteiner, 2002), a stronger emphasis on exploring the role of non-human entities in memory processes stands to challenge this conviction.