Collective Memory Work

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.

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this book covers the historical background of CMW as a methodology and its place within the wider context of qualitative research methods. It shows key features of the methodology with particular attention to current social issues, and is grounded in the case studies that show its practical applications.

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.

How do we use our mental images of the present to reconstruct our past? Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) addressed this question for the first time in his work on collective memory, which established him as a major figure in the history of sociology. This volume, the first comprehensive English-language translation of Halbwach's writings on the social construction of memory, fills a major gap in the literature on the sociology of knowledge. Halbwachs' primary thesis is that human memory can only function within a collective context. Collective memory, Halbwachs asserts, is always selective; various groups of people have different collective memories, which in turn give rise to different modes of behavior. Halbwachs shows, for example, how pilgrims to the Holy Land over the centuries evoked very different images of the events of Jesus' life; how wealthy old families in France have a memory of the past that diverges sharply from that of the nouveaux riches; and how working class construction of reality differ from those of their middle-class counterparts. With a detailed introduction by Lewis A. Coser, this translation will be an indispensable source for new research in historical sociology and cultural memory. Lewis A. Coser is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the State University of New York and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

An argument that individuals and collectives form memories by analogous processes and a case study of collective retrograde amnesia. We form individual memories by a process known as consolidation: the conversion of immediate and fleeting bits of information into a stable and accessible representation of facts and events. These memories provide a version of the past that helps us navigate the present and is critical to individual identity. In this book, Thomas Anastasio, Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, Patrick Watson, and Wenyi Zhang propose that social groups form collective memories by analogous processes. Using facts and insights from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and history, they describe a single process of consolidation with analogous—not merely comparable—manifestations on any level, whether brain, family, or society. They propose a three-in-one model of memory consolidation, composed of a buffer, a relator, and a generalizer, all within the consolidating entity, that can explain memory consolidation phenomena on individual and collective levels. When consolidation is disrupted by traumatic injury to a brain structure known as the hippocampus, memories in the process of being consolidated are lost. In individuals, this is known as retrograde amnesia. The authors hypothesize a "social hippocampus" and argue that disruption at the collective level can result in collective retrograde amnesia. They offer the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as an example of trauma to the social hippocampus and present evidence for the loss of recent collective memory in mainland Chinese populations that experienced the Cultural Revolution.

When discussing large social trends or experiences, we tend to group people into generations. But what does it mean to be part of a generation, and what gives that group meaning and coherence? It's collective memory, say Amy Corning and Howard Schuman, and in Generations and Collective Memory, they draw on an impressive range of research to show how generations share memories of formative experiences, and how understanding the way those memories form and change can help us understand society and history. Their key finding—built on historical research and interviews in the United States and seven other countries (including China, Japan, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, and Ukraine)—is that our most powerful generational memories are of shared experiences in adolescence and early adulthood, like the 1963 Kennedy assassination for those born in the 1950s or the fall of the Berlin Wall for young people in 1989. But there are exceptions to that rule, and they're significant: Corning and Schuman find that epochal events in a country, like revolutions, override the expected effects of age, affecting citizens of all ages with a similar power and lasting intensity. The picture Corning and Schuman paint of collective memory and its formation is fascinating on its face, but it also offers intriguing new ways to think about the rise and fall of historical reputations and attitudes toward political issues.

What is the symbolic impact of the Vietnam War Memorial? How does television change our engagement with the past? Can the efforts to wipe out Communist legacies succeed? Should victims of the Holocaust be celebrated as heroes or as martyrs? These questions have a great deal in common, yet they are typically asked separately by people working in distinct research areas in different disciplines. Frames of Remembrance shares ideas and concerns across such divides.

Tracking the ways in which journalism and memory mutually support, undermine, repair and challenge each other, this fascinating collection brings together leading scholars in journalism and memory studies to investigate the complicated role that journalism plays in relation to the past.