Speakers
Description
In memory studies in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, there is a lack of research on memories of ageing. This is counterintuitive, because these memories rely on bigger cultural meanings of ability and age, on meaning-making within groups (e.g. the family), they are highly affective, often inform future imagination, and are key to policy debates. These are all cultural and political processes that memory studies have a high stake in. At the same time, in fields where ageing is central (such as social gerontology), there is abundant research on the meaning of and experience of ageing (Hvalvik and Reierson 2011; Elias and Lowton 2014; Diodati 2023), but this research takes presentist perspectives and doesn’t tap into the memory studies vocabulary.
We believe that the main reasons for this lack of cross-disciplinary fertilization are memory studies’ strict focus on events. Memory studies scholarship has incredibly theorized how memories of extraordinary crises that were instantly disruptive for society and which took place in a relatively short time span (e.g. wars, genocides, terrorist attacks, natural disasters) shape the present and the future. Memories of gradual processes of change, such as ageing (but also climate change and deindustrialization), are often sidelined in memory studies research (Jones and Van de Putte 2024, Wustenberg 2023, Craps et al 2017). For these gradual processes, social groups often lack schematic narrative templates and master narratives (see e.g. Wertsch 2021), which are the core empirical materials of memory studies.
In this pilot study, we explore one potential empirical pathway to studying collective memories of ageing, which could also be adapted to the study of other memories of gradual processes. We conduct a micro-analysis of interview fragments with older adults and family carers who were asked to remember and narrate the transition to dependency on informal and formal care for activities of daily living (e.g., walking, eating, dressing). While the underlying process of ageing was not directly asked about, it is so salient for them that participants intertwine their explicit narratives of increasing dependency with mnemonic references to their (often gradual) ageing process. These references to slow ageing are, however, never fully fledged narratives. They are small and implicit stories (Georgakopoulou 2007, Meretoja 2023, 2024): discursive references -often not more than a few words- that emerge in interaction with the interviewer. They reference bigger underlying narratives of gradual ageing that remain unuttered, but whose meanings is understood by both the interviewee and the interviewer and directly supports and justifies more explicit master narratives of eventful personal pasts. We argue that our empirical approach, searching for implicit narrative and small stories within bigger narratives, might also serve as a conceptual and empirical solutions for memory studies scholars who want to grasp how people, and the groups they are part of, attribute meaning to other gradual processes in the past.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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