Training Workshops : Memory Methods
Date: 18 June 2009 (full day workshop, 9.30am - 4pm)
Location: Humanities Bridgeford Street Building, University of Manchester
Workshop organiser: Brian Heaphy
Workshop summary
This workshop focuses on different approaches to researching, prompting and working with memory. It will concentrate on conceptual, practical and ethical issues and will include expert overviews of archiving memories, sensory methods, memory work and hands-on practice of era memory workshops.
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 9.30 | Registration, tea and coffee |
| Session 1: Different approaches to 'memory methods' | |
| 10.00 | Using Mass Observation Archives for researching memories When the social research organisation Mass Observation (MO) began work in 1937, its aim was primarily to capture the here and now of everyday life. Its observers recorded behaviour and events as they were happening or as soon after as they could. Because of this the resulting archive is often seen as a counterbalance to the work of auto/biographers and oral historians who gather testimonies looking back over time. Dorothy Sheridan will explore the complementary nature of MO as a resource and discuss how MO material from the past and gathered today might shed light on the way we make our memories. Professor Dorothy Sheridan, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex Library |
| 10.45 | Memory work: traditions, recipes and resemblances Memory work is a technique for the exploration of relationships between pasts, presents and futures that has had recurrent moments of popularity in feminist academic communities. In this paper I provide an overview of the very different ways in which memory work has been exercised and adapted, explicited through three examples: the work of Frigga Haug and colleagues 'Female Sexualisation', the work of June Crawford and colleagues 'Emotion and Gender', and the work of Annette Kuhn 'Family Secrets'. Each offers a distinct recipe for the memory work, and I outline the resemblance and differences between them. In telling a story of memory work, I seek to demonstrate how research methods emerge in concrete situations, yet can be creatively appropriated and transposed into new contexts. Professor Rachel Thomson, Open University
|
| 11.30 | Break |
| 11.45 | Using Photograph Collections as a Memory Method In this presentation I consider what happens when women talk to an interviewer about their girlhood photo collections. How do photo collections contribute to memory? The research that I will draw on is a study of the photos that British women, born between 1938 and 1946, collected during their youth in the 1950s and 1960s. I will argue that there are important differences between interviews focused on a photo or two that the subject has singled out for attention, and interviews that address photo collections. Dr Penny Tinkler, University of Manchester |
| 12.30 | Lunch |
Session 2: Synthesizing and extending memory methods |
|
| 1.30 | Era Memory Workshop - introduction and practice Katherine Davies, Brian Heaphy, Jennifer Mason and Carol Smart, University of Manchester |
| 2.45 | Break |
| 3.00 | Application to our own research Discussion of how the methods discussed today meet (or not) the conceptual, practical and ethical challenges of our own research |
| 3.30 | Whole group discussion |
| 4.00 | Close |
