Fabrications

The objects that surround us tell a story of our past, and act as physical stand ins for a person, place, or experience no longer present. My work explores the significance of objects and how we use them to preserve our memories and make them tangible. Memory is ephemeral and changes over time, simultaneously growing weaker and stronger. I use clay to accentuate this relationship, visually depicting both preservation and decay. Inspired by my personal narrative, I recreate specific objects of significance by hand. This results in subtle variations of the original, much like the changes in our memory over time. Each piece becomes a fabrication of an original object, just as our memories are a fabrication of the original experience. Themes of storage, disintegration, alteration, and addition reflect the processes involved in memory formation and the effect of time on our recall. Through this process, I am exploring how much our identity is reliant on our memories, how we preserve our past in order to inform our present, and the ways in which our objects serve as characters in our narrative of self

Rightly or for Ill: the Ethics of Remembering and Forgetting

Forgetting a birthday, a wedding anniversary, a beloved child\u27s school play or a dear colleague\u27s important accomplishments is often met with blame, whereas remembering them can engender praise. Are we in fact blameworthy or praiseworthy for such remembering and forgetting? When ought we to remember, in the ethical sense of \u27ought\u27? And ought we in some cases to allow ourselves to forget? These are the questions that ground this philosophical work. In fact, we so often unreflectively assign moral blame and praise to ourselves and others for memory behaviors that this faculty, and moral responsibility for it, deserve careful philosophical attention. These questions of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness for memory do not pertain only to individual memory behaviors. Collective memory behaviors may also be morally blameworthy or praiseworthy. Consider the matters of how South Africans go about remembering apartheid, how Bosnian Serbs and Albanian Muslims go about remembering their conflicts, or whether and how Americans never forget September 11, 2001. In fact, individual and collective memory are not as separate as you might think. Though individual memory is based in the individual\u27s biology—the functions of the brain—individuals are members of collectives; our individual memories are both shaped by social interaction to a surprising degree and major loci of collective memory. Thus, determining moral blameworthiness or praiseworthiness for memory behaviors is a complicated philosophical endeavor. To address these issues, I set myself three tasks. First, to analyze the nature of both individual and collective memory using philosophical, neuropsychological, sociological sources. This reveals that both individual and collective memory are best conceived as constructions, not necessarily inaccurate, but certainly not perfect recordings of events. Individual memory constructions are influenced not only by our choices, but also by neurological and social determinants. Individuals are one locus for collective memory storage—others include memorials, books, songs, and national holidays—and are agents for collective memory construction. My second task is to analyze moral responsibility, specifically what makes us praiseworthy and blameworthy. Ultimately, I reject libertarian conceptions of moral responsibility and adopt Nomy Arpaly\u27s influential reasons-responsiveness which holds that the moral worth of an agent depends on the moral desirability of an action and the degree of moral concern with which she pursues it. My third task is to apply this analysis to both individual and collective memory behaviors. In doing so, I generate a preliminary set of twelve rules for both individual and collective memory behaviors, each defeasible under conditions that change whether, and the degree to which, moral agents should be held praiseworthy or blameworthy. I intend that these twelve rules and their attendant considerations of application and defeasibility provide not only philosophers but moral agents more generally with useful tools for a reflective ethics of memory. By such means may we all remember and forget rightly, and not for ill

Filtered Fiction, Tunnel Truth

The purpose of this writing is to ask questions about identity, to re-evaluate and to better articulate my world and self. The form of this manuscript is a blend of poetry and prose forms, mainly autobiographical in nature, somewhat fictionalized (or revised) and using subjects that are most significant to the understanding of my world and self views, ancestry and family, education, environment, etc.{dollar}\..{dollar}; My goal, and reasons for the content and form selections, is not to find truth and convince my audience of this truth--to achieve synthesis of thought. Instead, through my writing I intend to deeply probe and present ambiguities and possibilities of our world, investigate my perspective, and hopefully encourage a search and a conversation with readers. The searching and conversing together, to whatever degree that is possible, is the motivation; Do I answer my questions; do I discover anything? Perhaps, but more important is the structure of the questioning, a series of reflections that trigger other memories and questions in myself and in my readers; an invitation to a conversation. The quest, the search for and creation of self and world through storytelling is a commonality of all thinking beings, and through sharing and combining our infinitely diverse stories we can continue to negotiate an understanding of being human. This is my story

Nonfiction, Documentary and Family Narrative: An Intersection of Representational Discourses and Creative Practices

Nonfiction, Documentary, and Family Narrative: An Intersection of Representational Discourses and Creative Practices explores the role of personal memory, family history, and inter-generational storytelling as the basis for making a nonfiction film. The film, American Boy, tells the story of my mother’s immigration to the United States after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, opening a discussion of four generations of my family life in the context of historical events, exile, self re-invention, and identity formation. As a media producer and nonfiction author, I narrate my understanding of these events to my infant son, as a way of communicating my grandfather’s role in the revolution, my mother’s childhood, and my own mediation of my family’s trauma. Through the use of archival footage including newsreels and commercials, as well as my own archive of family photos and documents, I re-construct the existing materials to build my own associations concerning time, memory, and place. The film, as my creative practice, leads to a theoretical analysis of representational discourses which inform the work. This deconstruction of nonfiction and meta-analysis includes my study of several practitioners in the craft of non-fiction: Kati Marton, Robert Root, Primo Levi, Eva Hoffman, Patricia Hampl, Dinty W. Moore, Peter Balakian and others

The Self and Autobiographical Memory: Correspondence and Coherence

Introduces a modified version of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce\u27s Self Memory System (SMS) account of autobiographical memory and the self. Discussion of a fundamental tension between adaptive correspondence and self-coherence; Examination of tension; Application of SMS to personality and clinical psychology

Prospective thinking; scenario planning meets neuroscience

The Intuitive Logics (IL) scenario planning process is grounded in the work of Hermann Kahn and Pierre Wack in the 1960s and 1970s. Its broad adoption and sustained use over 50 years has taken it beyond the typical management fashion or fad. It has helped shape the strategies of many types of institutions and organisations. The process encourages individuals to recall past events and to imagine future happenings. But, little is known about neither how they do this nor the contextual conditions that shape how they do it and how they might do it better. Recent developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have had success in several management domains e.g., marketing, information systems, leadership, economics and finance. However, little attention has been paid to their application in strategic management and, in particular, in scenario planning. The paper provides a critical coverage of the pertinent cognitive sciences literature and explores opportunities for co-joint research between scenario planners and cognitive psychologists that might help to further foster and support the IL process

Cooking Memories: A Sheridan College Community Cookbook

With the support of an internal SRCA Growth Grant and a team of student editors and designers, Dr. Jessica Carey, professor in the faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences (FHASS), has produced Cooking Memories: A Sheridan Community Cookbook - a collection of over forty recipes and food stories contributed by staff, faculty, and students at Sheridan College. The collection showcases the diversity of the Sheridan community in its wide range of cuisines and food experiences and presents a snapshot of the lived experience of people working and studying at Sheridan during the pandemic. The Cookbook is a unique record of contemporary collective memory, valuable to scholars and researchers in multiple fields including food studies, memory studies, and other historical and cultural disciplines. For the Sheridan community, the cookbook is both a community-building project - especially welcome during the pandemic - and a practical cooking resource.https://source.sheridancollege.ca/fhass_books/1022/thumbnail.jp