Being and Doing Collective Memory-Work Together as an Embodied Praxis

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

Abstract

Purpose: We explore the power of the methodology of collective memory-work (CMW) to create and sustain relationships that are rooted in a commitment to criticality in our daily lives and our work. We contend that much of our time together is spent in what we conceptualize as an expansive and embodied CMW process. This practice arose organically over the years, first studying and applying the theory and methodology of CMW as inquiry, and then as we transitioned into collective critical analysis of our experiences as faculty via our monthly sessions. Given that this practice has developed somewhat subconsciously, we assert that it can be characterized as an embodied CMW practice.

Perspectives: We have maintained a CMW practice for over a decade, which originated in an independent study on feminism, teaching, and research that we formed in critique of our department‘s lack of any official coursework on feminist theory. Frigga Haug and Frauenformen’s work (1987) developing and practicing CMW was one of the texts with which we engaged early on in our study, which resulted in CMW becoming the methodological structure for our work together in the independent study. We were drawn to CMW for its emphasis on critical theory and its centering of collectivity; these are ontological and epistemological stances that have always been central to our work.

Methodology: In early iterations of our work, we developed prompts, wrote memories in third person, and utilized collective textual analysis protocols as Frigga Haug and her collective outlined in their “How To” document (1999). These practices were fruitful and illuminating. For the last several years, however, CMW–or rather, its essence–has become embedded and embodied in our monthly collective sessions, whereby our critical analysis of memory has enabled care and compassion, relationship-building, and theory-making (and vice versa) between the three of us.

Material: In these sessions, we have explored tensions in teaching (especially given the increasingly politically-charged nature of education), professional growth and leadership, navigation of neo-colonial and capitalist systems (higher education in the U.S.), and building and sustaining lives as white women women academics while living through racial uprisings, political upheaval, climate change, and a global pandemic.

Scholarly significance: This complex, emotional, and troubling work has required, as a collective and as individuals, an engagement with embodiment and somatic practices in our inquiry. We further our exploration of embodiment and the body as a site for holding memories by sharing some ways that embodiment and somatic practices are linked to memory and CMW. We draw on the notion of embodied cognition, which examines the ways our bodies are sites of learning, as well as somatic practices, such as grounding, orienting, and resourcing. CMW allows us to sustain our commitment to critical perspective, arising from our own lived experiences, as well as from a sense of deep, critical care for each other, our students, and our commitments and values.

Authors

• Angela Coffee, Century College

• Colleen Clements, University of Minnesota

• Erin Beeman Stutelberg, Salisbury University