“She didn’t feel bad at all”: Rewriting in Collective Memory-Work as a Site of Rupture

• In Event: Collective Memory-Work for Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: A Feminist, Collective Approach to Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose: This paper intends to explore how early memories of nature shape the construction of self in relation to land. Through co-writing and co-analysis of an early childhood memory, we investigate how land-based memories—often mundane, sensory, or disciplinary—can be reactivated through narrative and rewriting to reveal complex negotiations of power, cultural expectation, and belonging.

Our study investigates two critical research questions:
How do early childhood memories of land and nature participate in constructing one’s sense of self and place?
How can the rewriting process in CMW serve as a decolonial method for disrupting dominant narratives of childhood, education, and cultural belonging?


Theoretical Framework: We situate our work in the entanglement of ecofeminist theory (Wei & Li, 2019; Musser, 2024), decoloniality (Simpson, 2014; Tuck et al., 2014; Wildcat et al., 2014), and Black and Indigenous land-based pedagogies (Wildcat et al., 2014; Nxumalo & Cedillo, 2017). We treat land not as a neutral backdrop but as a system of reciprocal social relations, while rewriting memories is to refuse and reorient. This study emerges from a shared desire to explore how we, as diasporic, racialized, and gendered individuals in the U.S. academy, carry embodied experiences shaped by schooling, family, and land.

Methodology: CMW unearths ways individuals construct their identity (Haug, 2008). As such, this study investigates participants’ earliest memories of the subject “mud on shoes” to reveal how they existed in relation to land and self before the full impact of social constructs and influence altered their identities over time. These early memories are host to contradictions and inquiry within the space of identity construction. The research steps follow Haug’s 1999 process, including memory sharing, analysis, rewriting, and thematic synthesis. We highlighted rewriting as a recently overlooked procedure. As a group, we were drawn to this methodology for its definitive feminist and anti-capitalist underpinnings and its insistence on working within a collective. This methodology aligns with our political aims to disrupt systems of power and oppression through a queer feminist lens.

Data sources: Data includes original memory narratives (written), audio recordings of sessions with transcripts, and annotated rewrites. Each team member contributed to transcription, annotation, and thematic coding using iterative dialogue and visual mapping.

Results: We found that formative memories play a significant role in constructing one's identity within the context of systemic power dynamics that shape society. The act of rewriting these memories seeks not only to remember but to re-member—to reconnect fragmented pasts and forge new relationships with place, body, and community. Meanwhile, this study can serve as a sample that examines how body-land connections inform ways of knowing and relational identities.

Scholarly significance: This contributes to curriculum studies, environmental education, and decolonial research by:
Highlighting rewriting as a methodological site of rupture and reinvention.


Expanding understanding of childhood agency.


Offering a cross-cultural feminist praxis.


We argue that memory is not a static archive but a generative, embodied terrain to imagine more just and liberatory futures.

Authors

• Peng Nelson, University of Minnesota

• Yilin Wei, University of Minnesota

• Kelly O'Brien, Hennepin County Sheriff's Office