Introduction
The multidisciplinary field of memory studies continues to grow in size and significance. The Memory Studies Association conference in Copenhagen, held in December 2017, was certainly a testament to this growing interest, with 600 scholars from 58 countries spanning six different continents in attendance. A key discussion point at that conference was the interdisciplinarity of scholars engaged in memory research, which holds much pertinence to the works in this volume. This interdisciplinarity draws across, and functions within, well-established and sometimes fiercely defended disciplinary boundaries; it traverses the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the psychological sciences. It would be disingenuous to suggest that we necessarily agree with or would replicate all the methodological approaches used by memory-studies colleagues in their respective fields. Yet this interdisciplinarity does engender an awareness and appreciation of how memory research is done, and done differently.
The scholars whose work appears in this collection all hail from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: cultural and human geography, media studies, digital ethnography, landscape archaeology, sociology, social anthropology, fine arts, literature studies, digital heritage, and public history. All of them also draw from an impressive array of qualitative investigative methods to do their memory research. Further, their engagements with memory demonstrate how many ways we have to define, delineate, think with/about, or practice, perform, maintain, enact, discuss, and (re)produce memory. In memoryâs varied meanings is the potential of âmemory workâ to animate, energise, and inspire, and reveal new and different methodological approaches and methods. This innovation affords exciting opportunities to learn, practice, adopt, and adapt new methods and invites us to reflect on our different investigative and analytic skills.
For this volume, to foreground the methodological concerns of such research, we invited contributors to critically reflect on how they do their memory research, and to consider how they use and combine different tools, technologies, or bodies, for example. Recurrent themes in their accounts of memory work include encounter, emplacement, and the body, and engagement with memoryâs performativity, its affect, its visuality, and its sounds. How contributors âdoâ their work contributes to scholarship, offering rich insights about memory and its links to place and identity . As Leder Mackley and Pink (2017: 123, original emphasis) recently contended, âhow we knowâ what we know, through what method, forms part of our responsible practice as researchers and bears on our research integrity and accountability to other scholars, our participants, âand increasingly, to stakeholders and the wider publicâ. Yet, âquestions of method and methodologyâ related to memory studies are limited (Keightley and Pickering 2013: 2), so, too, targeted scholarship on how memory scholars draw from their disciplinary diversity to break new ground in method application and adaptation.
Keightley and Pickeringâs (2013) collection was the first to explicitly address research methods in memory studies, with a particular emphasis on oral history interviews and autobiography. The marked growth in memory work since that collection was published includes growth in the scope of research and the number and types of methods used by scholars and practitioners alike . That trend is evident in the flourishing of the Memory Studies Association, and the increasing recognition of memory studies as a distinct field of research (Roediger and Wertsch 2008; Kattago 2016; Olick et al. 2017). Drawing on such change, energy, and innovation, our focus here is on methods in memory studies and research based on memory work. Each chapter focuses in different ways on âdoingâ research rather than on narrating a theoretical supposition or case study and results. We hope that a practical consequence of the collection provides useful and practical exemplars for other memory-studies scholars, as well as insights into how the contributors both frame and do memory research.
Doing Memory Research
An Ethics of Care
Contributors to this volume demonstrate that doing memory studies requires sensitivity to, and awareness of, context because memory links people to space, place and identity , and to mobility/movement and time. Indeed, memories âboth inform and are informed by identities and these articulations take different forms in different placesâ, and from different temporal viewpoints (Drozdzewski et al. 2016: 3). As Donohoe (2014: xiii) argues, writing about the phenomenological relationship between place and memory, place âidentifies one with a certain community of people and shapes oneâs understanding of people and the worldâ. Because memory can play such a formative role in individual and collective notions of who we are (cf. Jones 2011), research must be sensitive in design. This caution does not necessarily relate to the potential of scholars and others to unwittingly engage in conversations about loss, disaster, or death (although these are common features of memory-studies research). Rather, such caution serves as a reminder that questions of memory relate inextricably to identities in the present (Legg 2004, 2005). Till and Kuusisto-Arponen (2015: 302) state that scholars of memory âhave an ethical responsibility to try to understand why different social groups and individuals may wish to raise questions or stories about traumatic pasts at a particular place and moment in time, even if this means taking additional time to listenâ.
Apprehending these requisites for sensitivity and respect, an ethics of care emerged as another strong theme across our contributorsâ discussions of doing memory research, especially when determining how an ethics of care informed practice and choice of method. For example, to navigate working at the interface of traumatic and contested memory, Halilovich and FejziÄ use art praxis to âpoint to multilayered dimensions of memoriesâ of conflict in Bosnia (this volume). Evident in their work is a ârelational ethics of care [that] emphasizes the role of connection and feeling in the principlesâ in guiding research design, process and practice (Ellis 2017: 58). Halilovich and FejziÄ have paid attention to how their own war experiences informed and influenced their data collection strategies and remained mindful of the rawness of their research narrative. In earlier work on wounded cities , Till (2012: 8) has discussed how a place-based ethics of care in memory-work encompasses âpractices of attending to, caring for, and making placeâ to constitute âdifferentiated and active forms of belonging and political communityâ. Correspondingly, in this volume, Gensburgerâs approach to overhearing conversations about the Parisian terror attacks and interviews with people comprises another example of attuning research process to an ethics of care.
Thinking ethically about how to gather memory data from and/or in public spaces has also guided othersâ research design using digital platforms (Schuurman and Pratt 2002). For example, again in this volume, Arrigoni and Galani have used images already available in the public domain in their discussions about place memory, and they made their accumulated data set publicly accessible by constructing links to images in their original digital location. Mindful of existing stereotypes and community antagonism, Shea (this volume) has adopted a community-engaged research method with crowdsourcing and participant -led data collection to show how place-making reveals performances of memory . That method enables Shea to recognise both individual and collective memory narratives. Sheaâs research exemplifies âthinking about care as an activity, and as a kind of universal, arising out of a sense of responsibility toward othersâ (McEwan and Goodman 2010: 10...