Rewilding memory

Abstract

Rewilding memory provides the basis for a new theoretical and practical agenda to bring greater neurological human diversity and ecological diversity into research and teaching on memory, mind and media. The article develops the concept of ‘more-than-human-memory’ to refer to the co-construction of memories between diverse humans and the environment. The article draws on research that examined a transmedia corpus of 40 neurodivergent memory works (life writing, memoirs, autobiographical art, blogs and videos). It found that memory works by autistic people consistently remember the self in terms of the co-composition of human memories through and with the media and matter of environmental memories. The article explores the ways in which some autistic people's memory works decentre human memories through deep ecological memory, conversations with vibrant objects and memories of animating energies. The research suggests that such memories ‘rewild’ or eco-neuroqueer the human-centred and normatively biased assumptions of memory, mind and media that underpin psychology, philosophy of mind, media and memory studies. It contributes a new angle to research that addresses the dialogical relationship between what Barnier and Hoskins (2018) have termed ‘memory in the mind’ and ‘memory in the wild’. It also goes beyond extended mind theory that understands human memory as enhanced and extended through non-biological tools and suggests the significance to memory of the more-than-human living world. Importantly, it highlights connections between autistic more-than-human-memories and the conceptualisation and practices associated with the more-than-human in research shaped by eco-psychology, Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities.

Introduction. The Anarchive of Memories

“…Memories are created and take shape through affective pulls, relations between and across beings, times, spaces, places, feelings, historical events, and more (Reading 2022). Approaching memories as affect that has the capacity to move things, create realities, cut across many divides-the personal/collective, real/imagined, human/more-than-human, true/ subjective-highlights 'how memories materially affect the world (just as they are themselves affected by events)' (Fox and Aldred 2019, p. 21).…”

POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE FICTION: FORMULA ANALYSIS ON ELLE McNICOLL’S NOVEL SHOW US WHO YOU ARE

“…However, it is these fragmentations that form the basis for the posthuman era which makes memory an alternate world that forces the virtual world to look real. Moreover, this postmnemotechnic is finally reformulated by neurodivergent writers to deconstruct narratives that are not related to neurodivergence, which indicate that neurodivergent survivors are always underestimated or seen as useless human beings (Reading, 2022). Therefore, conventions and inventions in science fiction nowadays are evolving within the marginalization on disabilities as an opportunity to resist stereotypes and the struggle they have experienced such as the transformation from male to female hero (Calvin, 2016) , hard SF (technology) to soft SF (utopian) (Mirenayat, Bahar, Talif, & Mani, 2017), normal people to neurodivergent (Flynn, 2019).…”