Collective Memory Work as the beginning of a way towards collective action?

• In Event: Education Utopias and Social Change

Proposal

In the cumulative dissertation project, I explore relationship and impact of experiences of discrimination to/on educational processes. The aim is to show in subjective experiences the concretisation of discrimination relations which counteract the educational system's claim to equal opportunities and justice. I would further like to contribute to tracing emancipatory potentials in talking and researching together about discrimination experiences. I choose approaches that make room for individual and collective articulation. When working on my second research question, the emancipatory potentials of talking and researching together, I worked with the method of Collective Memory Work (Haug 2008; Hamm 2021) with students.
The approach via biographical narratives opens a way to look at subjective, institutional and societal levels in their dialectical interconnectedness (Dausien/Rothe/Schwendowius 2016). Two aspects of the process structure come into play: implicit biographical knowledge as trace of experience and explicit self-reflexive attitudes - furthermore, the thesis that this biographical self-reflexivity influences the educational process of the subjects. (ibid., 58f) With Sara Ahmed (2012), the analytical framework can include the concepts of brick walls, being directed, and coming up of and bumping against barriers. On the way through and into school and university, some people are already involved in diversity work in Ahmed’s second sense just by being there (through their efforts of recognised existence in institutions) - but mostly unknowingly or at least unintentionally. Ahmed's concept of brick walls works with barriers that may be invisible to more normative subjects (because they conform to the intended direction, their being directed is fitting to the institutional/dominant social ways), while for certain persons they act as barriers, sometimes as hard as brick walls. This also influences my methodological approach: to understand the (university/school) world, to learn about it, via experiences that non-norm-filling existences have (together with them). (Ahmed 2017, 26ff)
One (sub)project was the work with HE students on their experiences around discriminatory aspects in education via Collective Memory Work. CMW understands itself as a political, pedagogical and scientific method at the same time (Haug 1999, 16). For CIES I reflect on the experiences in those collectives around the question: Collective Memory Work as the beginning of a way toward collective action?
In offering these thoughts for discussion a contribution should be made to Sub-Theme 4: Pedagogies and Protest – especially the questions: How do we learn to take civil actions collectively? What pedagogies might our education institutions and sets of classrooms embrace that enable the development of capacities to act?

References:
Ahmed, Sara (2012): On Being Included. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara (2017): Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Dausien, Bettina/Rothe, Daniela & Schwendowius, Dorothee (2016): Bildungswege. Frankfurt: Campus.
Hamm, Robert (2021): The potential of Collective Memory-Work as a method of learning. Sligo: Beltra.
Haug, Frigga (2008): "Memory-work: A detailed rendering of the method for social science research." in: Dissecting the mundane, edited by Hyle/Ewing/Montgomery & Kaufman. Pp. 21-44. Lanham: University Press of America.
Haug, Frigga (1999): Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Erinnerungsarbeit. Hamburg: Argument.

Author

• Jacqueline Hackl, University of Vienna