Collective Memory Work

This volume puts memory into action to enact a more socially just future. Drawing from rich theoretical terrain, interwoven with innovative and relevant research, the chapters showcase the rich potential of doing collective memory work to critically question the relations of memory, media, gender, sexuality, racialization, education, and more. This is an inspiring collection—looking back, I wish I’d had this book years ago; looking ahead, it’ll take an important place in my future teaching and research.

Brett Lashua, Reader in Leisure and Popular Culture, Leeds Beckett University

This book provides a compelling account of collective memory work as a methodological approach that wrestles with the complex workings of power in the generation and shared analysis of everyday experiences. The diverse chapters in the collection echo a desire to reveal the subtle and coercive effects of gender, race and sexuality that play out through discursive mediations that perpetuate injustice and normalised imperatives. By attuning to the embodied processes of remembering, speaking, listening, writing and enacting collective memory work this book reinvigorates an important methodological approach to transforming knowledge and also ourselves within it.

Simone Fullagar Chair, Physical Culture, Sport and Health research group, Department for Health, University of Bath

"The book is a very good resource for anybody doing qualitative research interested in working with this approach. This definitely could be graduate students since most of the research discussed in the book is doctoral research. But the book is also highly recommended for researchers and social activists in the broad field of education and social work. If the readers are not already convinced of what collective memory work can do, this book definitely will convince them!"

Brigitte Hipfl, University of Klagenfurt, Austria