Empowering Critical Memory Consciousness in Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Alexandre Dessingué ◽  
Ketil Knutsen
Keyword(s):  
History Education ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Dynamic Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Educational Perspective ◽  
Official Sources

This article addresses memory studies from an educational perspective. In order to encourage pupils and students as independent agents in memory cultures they are part of, it is not enough to (as history education prescribes) learn history as a narrative about the past based on official sources or via the analyses of different uses of history. Rather, today history should also be considered as one of many different dynamic memory acts that define and redefine the past and the societies we live in. We therefore develop the concept of critical memory consciousness and argue for a memory pedagogy that gives learners the possibility to analyze memories that arise out of collective, cultural, and dialogic processes.

Memory Practices in the Classroom

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Ahlrichs ◽  
Katharina Baier ◽  
Barbara Christophe ◽  
Felicitas Macgilchrist ◽  
Patrick Mielke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
History Education ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Past ◽  
Online Videos ◽  
Memory Practices

This article draws on memory studies and media studies to explore how memory practices unfold in schools today. It explores history education as a media- saturated cultural site in which particular social orderings and categorizations emerge as commonsensical and others are contested. Describing vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork in German secondary schools, this article identifies different memory practices as a nexus of pupils, teachers, blackboards, pens, textbooks, and online videos that enacts what counts as worth remembering today: reproduction; destabilization without explicit contestation; and interruption. Exploring mediated memory practices thus highlights an array of (often unintended) ways of making the past present.

scholarly journals Of dragons and dinosaurs: How children’s toys and games create ideas of the past, of history and of fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kühberger
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
Fictional Representations

This article outlines a trend in popular historical culture which has seen the increasing replacement of a concept of history that rests on some form of evidence base by visions of fictional pasts, or – to put it more precisely – by an ambiguous blend of the past and fictional pasts. Drawing on ethnographic research focused on the contents of Austrian children’s rooms, this paper explores traceable manifestations of history and historical fiction, particularly toy dragons and dinosaurs, in their properties as objects and as focuses of their owners’ interpretations as ascertained in interviews. The research finds little clear demarcation in the minds of the children interviewed (all between 8 and 12 years old) between imaginings and cognitive attempts to reconstruct the past. The article examines the influence of these factual–fictional representations on historical thinking from a history education perspective.

scholarly journals Beyond trauma? Memories of Joi/y and memory play in Blade Runner 2049

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silke Arnold-de Simine
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

Cultural memory studies finds itself at an impasse: whereas ‘cultural memory’ is conceptualized as mediated, dynamic, imaginative and shaped by the present, the dominant paradigm of ‘trauma’ illuminates the hold the past has on us, casting the shadow of a melancholic subjectivity that threatens to obscure our agency as (political) subjects. This article asks what lies in store for memory studies beyond the focus on (classic) trauma (theory). Using the movie Blade Runner 2049 (US 2017; dir: Denis Villeneuve) as an illustrative example, it explores how creative and joyful forms of meaning-making through play and acts of memory inform each other in what the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott described as ‘cultural experience’.

Colonial memories and transnational mobilizations: Asia’s colonial veterans and their struggle for British citizenship, c. 1980–2015

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1129-1143
Author(s):  
Barbara Laubenthal ◽  
Daniel Schumacher
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political System ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Framing

This article focuses on campaigns by former colonial soldiers from Nepal and Hong Kong and their struggles for British citizenship over the last three decades. When analysing these mobilizations, we combine approaches from social movement research with insights from cultural memory studies. We use the concept of ‘relational fields’ to determine how these former colonial soldiers systematically utilized the past as a political framing device and thus revealed themselves to be not outsiders to the political system but equal players therein. We argue that their actions are best understood as a series of connected postcolonial civil rights campaigns that often reinforce rather than reverse romanticized and positivist representations of Britain’s imperial past. While in some instances colonial veterans were able to mount meaningful political interventions, our analysis shows that the veterans’ eventual acceptance into British society could only come at the price of their continued stereotyped depiction as colonial subjects.

History—Consuming Pasts

1994 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 257-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Tanaka
Keyword(s):  
History Education ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Considerable Variability ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Teaching History ◽  
Interpretive Strategies

Abstract I use the idea of consumption to discuss questions of agency and purpose in history. History, as a consumer of pasts, is itself an agent in the interpretive strategies employed in the construction of a historical narrative. History also consumes people as it attempts to impose its homogenizing narrative. In these senses, there is purpose: to give order and meaning to—thus prioritizing—certain pasts over others and to define commonality—especially of the nation or nation-state—and thus marginality. This view brings out the historicity of history: that there is always contestation in representations of the past, and that there is considerable variability in how individuals make such history meaningful to themselves. The latter brings out another notion of consumption—that individuals consume history. Which parts of history people imbibe, however, depend on connections with their experience, their own pasts and histories. In terms of pedagogy, we must be aware that objectivistic history often meets resistance, invites parody, or fosters disbelief. If one goal of teaching history is to foster belief in the nation-state, then a monological narrative might not be the best way to accomplish that goal. (History; Education; Nation)

scholarly journals Republican Relicts: Gender, Memory, and Mourning in Irish Nationalist Culture, ca. 1798–1848

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-637
Author(s):  
Catriona Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

Archaeology and Social Memory

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth M. Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Treatment And Disposal ◽  
Native North America ◽  
Contemporary Past

This review provides a road map through current trends and issues in archaeological studies of memory. Many scholars continue to draw on Halbwachs for collective memory studies, emphasizing how the past can legitimate political authority. Others are inspired by Bergson, focusing on the persistent material intrusion of the past into the present. “Past in the past” studies are particularly widespread in the Near East/Classical world, Europe, the Maya region, and Native North America. Archaeologists have viewed materialized memory in various ways: as passively continuous, discursively referenced, intentionally invented, obliterated. Key domains of inquiry include monuments, places, and lieux de mémoire; treatment and disposal of the dead; habitual practices and senses; the recent and contemporary past; and forgetting and erasure. Important contemporary work deploys archaeology as a tool of counter-memory in the aftermath of recent violence and trauma.

Provincializing memory studies: Polish approaches in the past and present

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kornelia Kończal ◽  
Joanna Wawrzyniak
Keyword(s):  
Memory Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms

The history of memory studies has usually been told through research perspectives advanced in France, Germany and the United States. This well-established cartography and, thus, chronology of the field can be challenged while taking into account other provinces of thought. The example of Polish sociology and history shows that the Western memory boom took off just at the time when the golden age of the biographical method reached its apex in Poland and most research on historical consciousness had already been carried out. Furthermore, the Polish case illustrates how since 1989 researchers have been abandoning key terms previously used in the social sciences and humanities in favour of terminology related to memory. On the whole, the article argues for the exploration of continuities, ruptures and transformations of categories developed in non-mainstream research traditions to question the beaten tracks of the history of ideas.

Towards a cognitive pragmatics of collective remembering

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas M. Bietti
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Memory Research ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
Discourse Processes ◽  
Collective Remembering ◽  
Discourse Psychology

This article aims to provide a cognitive and discourse based theory to collective memory research. Despite the fact that a large proportion of studies in collective memory research in social, cognitive, and discourse psychology are based on investigations of (interactional) cognitive and discourse processes, neither linguistics nor cognitive and social psychologists have proposed an integrative, interdisciplinary and discursive-based theory to memory research. I argue that processes of remembering are always embodied and action oriented reconstructions of the past, which are highly dynamic and malleable by means of communication and context. This new approach aims to provide the grounds for a new ecologically valid theory on memory studies which accounts for the mutual interdependencies between communication, cognition, meaning, and interaction, as guiding collective remembering processes in the real-world activities.

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