Memory and Method

National Centre for Research Methods

This seminar will explore the interaction between memory and method in qualitative social research.

This seminar takes an interdisciplinary look at the interaction between memory and method in qualitative social research.It is the latest event in a series organised by Qualitative Expertise at Southampton (QUEST), the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership (SCDTP).The seminar will feature presentations from four speakers: Professor Emily Keightley (Loughborough University), Abigail Croydon (University of Southampton), Dr Deborah Madden (University of Brighton) and Meg Ison (University of Portsmouth).Abstracts for the presentations are detailed below.<h2>Postcolonial methodologies for memory research, Emily Keightley</h2>For several decades, memory studies as a field has engaged with questions of transnational and transcultural memory, directly addressing the role of memory in migration and the production of diasporic identities. However, it has been much slower in exploring these concerns through the lens of postcolonial studies, and to consider the explicitly postcolonial character of much contemporary remembering. In this talk I will consider what we might consider features of memory after empire to be, what postcolonial memory studies might look like, and the methodological challenges that this might pose. Using the ongoing research being undertaken as part of the Migrant Memory and Postcolonial Imagination project funded by The Leverhulme Trust (2017-2022) I will explore what a methodological framework for doing postcolonial memory studies might look like.Emily Keightley is Professor of Media and Memory Studies in the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University. Her research interests cover temporality, memory, and everyday life; media and communications technologies and their role in remembering and the experience of time; South Asia and memories of Empire and migration. Emily is the principal investigator of the five-year project Migrant Memory and Postcolonial Imagination project funded by The Leverhulme Trust (2017-2022). She is also Editor of the journal Media, Culture &amp; Society.<h2>Using video to revisit memory: methods to stimulate discussion in qualitative research, Abigail Croydon</h2>In approaching my research with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, I sought methods to support the discussion of learning at work with them. I will discuss first, the original rationale for the choice of video stimulated recall methods. I will then reflect on how the video functioned in practice, for all collaborators on the project. Using examples of video and its interpretation, I will discuss how bringing together remembered and recorded events can undermine initial interpretations. Since memory is selective and interpretive, video replay can bring to attention events that might have received little consideration as they were lived, while simplifying and flattening remembered incidents. Abigail Croydon is a ESRC South Coast DTP-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Southampton, researching social and cultural learning at work by young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She was previously a research officer at the UCL Centre for Research in Autism and Education, where she worked on projects concerning autistic perception and experiences of education and learning outside school, and on methods in relation to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She has recently written (with Melanie Nind) on disability and employment for the International Encyclopedia of Education.<h2>Using oral histories, site-responsive theatre and the historical archive to explore everyday cultures of grief during Covid-19, Deborah Madden</h2>This paper highlights work that was undertaken as part of a collaborative oral history and arts project at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.The project collected oral histories from palliative care clinicians and arts practitioners to contextualise Covid-19 through the lens of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, evaluating ‘everyday’ experiences and emotional responses to Covid-19. The presentation reflects on its methodology, dissemination and wider pedagogical purpose, expressed in a range of affective articulations, such as public history and theatre performance, the latter of which was required to migrate online during the UK’s lockdown. The work raised key questions about uses of the historical past and the hermeneutics of archival sources when investigating the emotional registers of past and present pandemics. The presentation also offers a perspective on the principles of collaboration, which it sees as key to the development of a critical methodological and pedagogical tool for an activist and politically engaged history of the present.Dr Deborah Madden is a cultural historian and Director for the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton. Here she leads on research in the area of medical histories and narratives. Her current work is concerned with the cultural politics of grief, mourning and sites of mourning, examining the ways in which personal, individual and collective expressions of grief can powerfully mobilise memories of the past. Her own training as a psychotherapist has facilitated research into the productive relationships between narrative, affect, public pedagogy and contemporary psychotherapy.<h2>Scoping the Field: Interdisciplinary methodological memory work in practice, Meg Ison</h2>In the Humanities and Social Sciences, ‘memory’ is conceptualised as a broad notion, to encompass social and cultural processes, technologies and carriers of different sorts of memory outside of the human brain. Different disciplines will inevitably have their own traditions, which makes it harder for any sole discipline to claim memory as ‘one’s own’. This makes memory an inherently interdisciplinary concept. Although the study of memory is not new, the field of memory studies emerged with the interdisciplinary turn during the 1980s. Whether we are sociologists, anthropologists, historians, art historians, literary scholars, philosophers, theologists, media studies specialists or political theorists, our common understanding is of memory as a social or cultural construction of the past in the present. Rather than focus on individuals’ memories, we are sensitive to the ways in which understandings of temporality and place are constructed, which affect identity formation in ways that vary across different times and spaces, and are not reducible to individuals who remember. Although this conceptualisation of memory is shared across disciplines, we are still constrained by discipline-specific theoretical frameworks and methods when we carry out research. This paper will take you through the nuts and bolts of constructing an interdisciplinary memory PhD back to front, and from the inside out: it is about the benefits of stepping outside the walls of the Ivory Tower and using a scoping field trip to carve out your place in the field.Meg Ison is a PhD researcher in the Area Studies Department at the University of Portsmouth. She studies the commemoration of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France. Her research is funded by the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership, ESRC.

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Memory and Method

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Memory and Method

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