Collective Memory Work

A Methodology for Learning With and From Lived Experience

Corey W. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315298696
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The seemingly mundane events of daily life create a complex knowledge base of lived experience to be explored. But how does one research common experiences and account for context, culture, and identity? A dilemma arises because experience is not just embedded in events, but also in the socially constructed meanings associated with those events.

This book details the philosophical underpinnings, design features and implementation strategies of Collective Memory Work – a methodology frequently employed by social justice activists/scholars. Collective Memory Work can provide scholars with unique and nuanced ways to solve problems for and with their participants.

Most importantly, the chapters also detail projects and social justice in action, analysing their participants' real stories and experiences: projects that focus on LGBTQ youth, #blacklivesmatter activists, white faculty working at historically Black colleges and universities, men's media consumption and much more. Written in an engaging and accessible style, readers will come to understand the potential of their own qualitative research using Collective Memory Work.

PART I

1

The History and Methodological Tradition(s) of Collective Memory Work

Corey W. Johnson , B. Dana Kivel, and Luc S. Cousineau

She remembered the time that she went to Atlantic City when she was six. She was there with her grandmother and her great aunt, Kate. She was very excited because she had never been to the beach before and had never seen such a huge wooden sidewalk (the boardwalk) and had never seen the ocean. She was amazed by how tall the hotel was and at how tasty the waffles were that she ate every morning. She also found a secret passageway under the hotel that took her out to the beach. It was on that same day, a day that she remembers as being very hot and sticky, that she noticed lots of people, and there were some kids who looked like her who were wearing shorts and no tops, and others who were wearing one-piece outfits that covered their bodies. She asked her grandmother about these swimsuits. Her grandmother said that only boys could wear shorts and no tops and girls had to wear suits that covered their entire bodies. She was confused because she thought for sure she saw girls wearing shorts and no tops. She didn’t think too much about it before she went running in the sand in her swimsuit, her grandmother, then in her early 60s, running behind to keep up with her.

On the face of it, this story looks like a child’s recollection of her first visit to the beach with her grandmother and great aunt. You might say that this is a fairly benign story: “this is a child’s earliest memory of going to the beach and of seeing children wearing different swimsuits.” Yet, if you were to ask a few questions about the story, examine the use of language—what was said and what was not said, the author’s use of verbs and adjectives, and narrative structure—you might see that there’s another story beyond the individual memory. Indeed, after a bit more analysis, you might say that this is a story about the ways in which an innocent leisure context serves as a powerful social force for gendering children; it is a story about what girls are taught about their bodies relative to boys, and what girls are taught about being female—‘covering up,’ lack of freedom, and shame (very potent and powerful messages that convey a status of ‘less than’ and ‘other’).

At the heart of this story and the discussion of its analysis is the question of ‘experience’ and what constitutes an individual’s experience. Can an individual experience be fully and wholly separated from the ideologies that have shaped an individual? How do individual experiences link to collective, shared experiences?

The answers to these questions can be found in the process and product of collective memory work (CMW). Based on an egalitarian approach to inquiry, collective memory work asks co-researchers (participants and researchers, or research teams) to recall, examine, and analyze their own memories. Exploring these memories within a broader cultural context allows them to see how their individual experiences link to collective, shared experiences of similar and/or different groups in society (Haug, 1992). Collective memory work is unique as participants are involved in the generation and analysis of data, which is useful to the community knowledge base and as a form of conscious raising as they engage in the process (Kidd & Kral, 2005).

What Are the Basics?

Grounded in social constructionism, the theoretical foundation of collective memory work rests on the idea that the effects of ideology and discourses (the metaphorical point where culture and language converge) position us in relation to a variety of social forces; they subject us. In other words, discourses enable us to see the ideological positions in cultural institutions and language. Rather than merely describing or mirroring reality, these discourses constitute and shape our concepts of identity (Campbell & Kean, 2016). This process encourages and assists participants to make sense of how, unconsciously and through the internalization of taken-for-granted beliefs, they have created social and ideological dimensions of identity, including gender, race, sexual orientation, and other socially relevant categories.

In collective memory work, the collective engages in a process of discourse analysis whereby they examine and deconstruct their own use of language in written narratives as “language is not simply a tool” but rather a means to “convey … the construction of meaning” (Haug, 1997, p. 9). The goal of this deconstructive analysis is to recognize the complexities obscured by the implied and tacit knowledge found in conversation, and therefore politicize speech. In the end, collective memory work seeks to unravel the ways in which individuals collaborate with discourse and ideology by implicating themselves in the social structures that act to oppress them (Haug, 1987, 1992, 1997). This unraveling allows us to see hegemonic identities at work. The result is the collective’s articulation of a theory that explains how everyday life is the site where society reproduces itself. This theory is grounded in the experiences of individuals constructed through cultural ideologies by processes of hegemony; in other words, this method allows for the personal sphere of experience to be articulated in political terms (Haug, 1987).

Much of the research around ‘experience’ has been focused at the individual level, with extended analysis from the researcher to societal or ideological contexts. While this approach illuminates the life of the individual, it does little to give wider context to that experience in a real way for the participant of the research. Sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987) argued for a contextualization of experience that is based on an examination of social relations and institutional structures. Smith (1987) asserted that, “Rather than explaining behavior, we begin from where people are in the world, explaining the social relations of the society of which we are part, explaining an organization that is not fully present in any one individual’s everyday experience” (p. 89). She argued that while we may not ‘see’ these institutional structures, they operate at various levels and in ways that influence our everyday experiences. Experience is never simply a reflection of what someone has done, felt, or thought—experience is always constructed through discourses of a priori knowledge and power (Smith, 1987). Similarly, individuals emerge in and through various ideologies and discourses of power that revolve around a variety of identity markers including gender, race, and sexuality. Thus, how can scholars examine individuals and their experiences apart from the ideologies and discourses that shape everyday lives ( Johnson & Samdahl, 2005; Kivel, 2000)? Instead, ‘experiences’ need to be contextualized and theorized in relation to these important social factors.

It is here where collective memory work can help us fill the void left by traditional research methodologies. The collaborative nature of the method, along with a natural inclination toward social justice in its practice, allows this method not only to contextualize individual experience within a collective social experience, but to have participants share and grow from their participation as co-researchers. What follows in this introductory chapter is an overview of collective memory work, from its inception in the work of Frigga Haug and her colleagues in the Socialist Women’s Association (Sozialistischer Frauenbund) in Germany, to its contemporary evolution and application across diverse fields of study. We begin with the onto-epistemological foundations of the method (Box 1.1). These foundations allow us to then explore the theoretical developments and evolutions of the method, including a detailed explanation of collective memory work and its offshoots in contemporary practice. Then, we provide a detailed exploration of how collective memory work has been used in academic research, followed by our own contributions to that collection of research. Finally, we will share what we hope this book will do, and what you can expect from the other chapters.

Onto-Epistemologies Theory

Box 1.1—Onto-Epistemologies

How we come to know knowledge, how truth(s) is/are understood, their expectations for researcher bias or subjectivity, the possibilities for capturing and relaying reality, their understandings of representational logic, and their intentions for research findings … underlying philosophies of science that contingently position researchers and their research (Berbary & Boles, 2014, p. 7).

Social Constructionism

Collective memory work is about uncovering ideologies that influence how individuals see themselves, their relationships with others, and the world. The practice of collective memory work is therefore grounded in the epistemological perspective of social constructionism (Crawford, Kippax, Onyx, Gault, & Benton, 1992; Kivel & Johnson, 2009; Onyx & Small, 2001). Within the social constructionist paradigm, meaning is created by the interaction of subject and object, where both of these are influenced by the social context in which they exist. Because of this, meaning is not discovered, but is instead constructed by those involved. Burr (2015) gives a thorough examination of social constructionism in her book on the paradigm and distills the main tenets to five significant points:

1. Social constructionism takes a critical approach toward taken-for-granted knowledge. This form of anti-essentialism challenges assumed understandings of experience and established facts, with particular attention to power structures and relations that affect the lives of those immersed in those power relationships.

2. Social constructionism approaches all ways of understanding as historically and socially relative. By working from the perspective that we construct our own social and cultural realities based on personal experiences, locality, and temporality, this paradigm is distinctly anti-realist, insofar as it does not privilege established understandings of what is ‘real’ above the lived experiences of individuals. By doing so, it acknowledges the experiences and lived realities of people as true and as legitimate reflections of the multiple truths and realities that are experienced by individuals.

3. Building on the stance of anti-realism, social constructionism understands that versions of knowledge become fabricated through daily interactions between people. This creates for the individual a historically and culturally specific form of knowledge that extends beyond the strictly personal and allows for collective understanding, or commonality.

4. Within social constructionism, knowledge and social action go together. Because of this, language becomes very important, as language is a pre-­condition for thought, and in itself can be a form of social action.

5. Social constructionism focuses on interaction and process. Beyond simple personal experiences, personal interactions, as well as the social processes and power relationships with which individuals are confronted in their daily lives, are significant influences on their realities.

Seeing what is ‘real’ as a constructed formulation of the interaction between the ‘known’ and the ‘knower’ allows for the existence of a subjectivity of knowledge in which truth, and particularly the truth of experience, is contingent on the knowledge, experiences, and understanding of the person undergoing the experience. It is these conditions that allow for the presentation and acceptance of memories as points of knowledge, and subsequently data in research projects.

It is here that we must discuss the use of memory as data. Although memories, as the personal reconstructions of events by the individual, are therefore the embodiment of socially and personally constructed ‘truths,’ Biklen (2004) cautions that memory is a complex and problematic phenomenon that must not be taken for granted. Biklen’s assertion is based on the fact that within memories and recollections, we often have gaps, confusion, and problematized recollections that are reflective of our current states of being and personal predilections at the time of remembering. There is also a danger, as highlighted by authors like Confino (1997), that memory, and especially collective memory, becomes depersonalized and turns out to be the political memory of liberalism, communism, regionalism, etc.; veiled in the personal account of the individual doing the remembering. Those elements considered, we believe that memories recollected, discussed, and analyzed do present important information and support the Personal Narratives Group’s (1989, cited in Glover, 2003) assertion that “when talking about their lives, people lie sometimes, forget a lot, exaggerate, become...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• List of Contributors
• Index