Memory Work Reconsidered

Abstract

In this article we discuss the epistemological status of the knowledge and understandings that a specific way of working with women's experiences-memory workgenerates. This discussion is held in the light of the last decades' feminist debate on the risks and problems inherent in research taking women's experience as a point of departure. We put forward memory work as a fruitful method of working scientifically with experiences, especially when it comes to understanding deeply naturalized power structures such as gender, nation, and sexuality. We show how different interpretative modes and practices in memory work may help us locate ruptures and ambivalences in the already known, and open up for understandings and interpretations that take us beyond the discursively given. However, several epistemological as well as methodological issues need to be addressed in order for memory work to render possible new forms of understanding that reach beyond established discourses and concepts. To avoid the muchdebated risk of essentialism and reproduction of different power structures, we argue that a great deal of reflection is required when elaborating research techniques. It is thereby necessary to carefully design the different steps in the process of memory work. This article shows how different ways of handling methodological problems in memory work-concerning foremost the choice of theme for the memory project, the textual practices used when writing memory stories, and the modes of interpretation employed-are crucial for what kind of analysis is made possible. We also highlight the importance of displacing the research problem at a certain distance from the theme of the project. The concepts of transferring and dislocating the research problem are introduced as a means to elucidate how different types of displacement generate different research results.

Reflecting Caring and Power in Early Childhood Education: Recalling Memories of Educational Practices

“…By using the memory-work method, it is possible to render new knowledge and forms of understanding that reach beyond established discourses. It may provide one way to understand the cultural and social influences in the lived practices and experiences of everyday life (Jansson, Wendt, & Å se, 2008).…”

Teaching Political Science through Memory Work

“…It has also been described as emancipating; when social and political power structures are made visible, it becomes easier for individuals to avoid feelings of guilt and=or personal failure and to begin to theorize and politicize issues or areas formerly constructed as ''private,'' natural, or banal (Henriksson et al 2000;Jansson, Wendt, and Å se 2008).…”

“…2 Important decisions when planning memory work concern the theme to be studied and the subject of the memory stories-what the stories are to be about. We have argued elsewhere (Jansson, Wendt, and Å se 2008) that careful and explicit reflection over the choice of the explicit subject of the memory stories is crucial in order to render new and fruitful problematizations and to create possibilities for the analyses to move beyond everyday conceptualizations of the social world. Previous research indicates that the most rewarding memory projects are those in which the explicit subject does not coincide with the more theoretically formulated problem or theme that is being studied.…”

“…For example we have found that it is advantageous if the subject matter of the memory story connects to a physical object (Jansson, Wendt, and Å se 2008). The writing and textual practices employed in the actual production of a memory story are aimed at creating a rich material where possibilities for various interpretations are opened.…”

Recipes as Memory Work: Slave Food

“…Since then, other disciplines have adopted memory work as a research methodology for their projects. Jansson et al (2008) argue that memory work can be a legitimate scientific methodology through which to theorise women's experiences in research projects analysing the interrelationship between social structures of power, the nation, and gender. They argue that increasing the specificity of the situations featured in the memory stories under discussion facilitates a smoother transference of the research problem from the abstract to the concrete.…”