A collective memory work: University students’ everyday life and experiences of belonging

The paper focus on methodological implications working with students’ everyday life experiences of (not) becoming, being and belonging as a student in higher education through the method of memory work (Haug 1992). Our theoretical framework builds on a wide array of inspirations from primarily feminist sociology such as Frigga Haug, Dorothy Smith, Bronwyn Davies and Karin Widerberg. Memory work is a collaboratory method where personal memories is written as detailed stories, anonymized and detached
from the individual ownership into an analytical ‘collective third’. Marginalized experiences are identified in the memories by asking for ‘the other stories’ inherent in the everyday experiences and thereby identifying the forms of institutionalized rationality, common sense and powerful social relations taken for granted. We discuss how relations of power, knowledge and learning are being produced between participants and researchers. Based on the empirical examples from the collective memory work project, we discuss how this collective and collaborative approach succeeds as an involving research and the possibilities of individual learning and empowerment working with memories as a collective learning process.