Background

Key Concepts

Communities of Memory

Different disciplines have different views of what a community is (or should be). One may look along a cultural dimension of community, or a social dimension, one may see a community as a symbolic construction, either constructed in social action or through values and normative structure. Political theorists and communitarians see a community primarily as a political community, urban planners as a locality, others focus on global and virtual communities.

The Memories, Communities, Technologies Network focuses on communities as "communities of memory". Being a community of memory involves an embeddedness in its past and, consequently, in the memory texts (in any form, written, oral, as well as physical) through which that past is mediated and through which the community links the present with the past and to the future. Of particular interest to the Network are post-colonial, post-trauma and diasporic communities of memory.

Memories and memory texts are being structured by contextuality while interacting with people and technologies: technologies of interaction in time-space (performing and recording, transfer and use) that condition not only the form or the structure, but also the content of memory texts, in a complex interaction with social and cultural norms (including the politics of memory).

A focus on communities of memory does not exclude personal memories and their interplay with memories of families, groups, and societies. Many personal memories contribute to those public narratives of community, religion, ethnicity and nation which make private identity possible. Life stories are about we, and belonging rather than I and singleness. Appropriating community memories is an element in the construction of self.

eResearch

The term “E-Research” is primarily used to describe the use of infrastructures enabling researchers working co-operatively across geographical and technical boundaries, and across multiple repositories and datasets. The Network’s working definition, however, extends the concept of eResearch to the engagement of communities and memory institutions as equal partners, taking into account its formative/transformative potential. eResearch challenges us to do research more collaboratively and creatively, and enables the dissemination of research outcomes across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Collaborative projects can develop inclusive eResearch methodologies and test models for empowering communities in the research process, and supporting participatory models of community-centred research.

Memory Institutions

Most memory institutions were established as community institutions, in a time when community was defined by the nation-state’s politics of memory. Today, more and more, these institutions are broadening their mission, opening up to (and empowering) other communities. However, any community of memory is entitled to establish and maintain its own repositories of memory texts (in any form), be it in a physical location or virtually. Frameworks for the selection, collection, arrangement and description, preservation and accessibility of memory texts are closely linked to societal processes of remembering and forgetting, inclusion and exclusion, and the power relationships they embody. In this sense, memory institutions are always political sites of contested memory and knowledge. The memory-texts of post-colonial, post-trauma and diasporic communities of memory are stored in multiple sites, many of them maintained by “the Others”, raising questions of preservation of and access to a joint heritage (or a “memory commons”) being used within different ontologies. This may entail redefining the boundaries and relationships between power, memories and identities at the levels of State, community and the individual. It may also entail redesigning some or all memory ‘institutions’ as adaptive, collaborative and trusted intelligent systems or grids.

Participatory Models of Community-Centred Research

Any research is inevitably framed in terms of a particular worldview. This may well be challenged by or will evolve based on richer understandings of differing worldviews emerging from the research.  In particular, research on Memories, Communities, Technologies needs to grapple with a range of insider/outsider issues in relation to the way in which research governance frameworks and protocols, ethics and ethics regimes, recognised rights in research data and outcomes, including ownership, intellectual property, access, informed consent, and privacy, are constructed. 

Therefore another critical focus for the Memories, Communities, Technologies Network is the formative/transformative nature of research frameworks and infrastructures themselves, including research and a related action agenda concerned with participatory models of community-centred research.