‘Remembering as Forgetting’: Organizational commemoration as a politics of recognition

This paper considers the politics of how organizations remember their past through commemorative settings and artefacts. Although these may be seen as ‘merely’ a backdrop to organizational activity, they form part of the lived experience of organizational spaces that its members enact on a daily basis as part of their routes and routines. The main concern of the paper is with how commemoration is bound up in the reflection and reproduction of hierarchies of organizational recognition. Illustrated with reference to two commemorative settings, the paper explores how organizations perpetuate a narrow set of symbolic ideals attributing value to particular forms of organizational membership while appearing to devalue others. In doing so, they communicate values that undermine attempts to achieve equality and inclusion. Developing a recognition-based critique of this process, the discussion emphasizes how commemorative settings and practices work to reproduce established patterns of exclusion and marginalization. To this end, traditional forms of commemorative portraiture that tend to close off difference are contrasted with a memorial garden, in order to explore the potential for an alternative, recognition-based ethics of organizational commemoration that is more open to the Other

Memorial meshwork: the making of the commemorative space of the Hyde Park 7/7 memorial

How do memorials act to transmit memory through the organization of space? In this paper we contrast a ‘preservation’ model of the endurance of encoded memory with a ‘meshwork’ model which treats memory as emergent on the perdurance of the memorial site. Developing a theoretical framework from Tim Ingold’s (2011; 2013) work, we describe how memorialization receives its spatial form through a collective work of braiding together multiple threads of activities and material flows. To illustrate, we examine the spatial and temporal organization of the Hyde Park 7/7 memorial from its initial designs, through to installation and contemporary use. We draw on interview data featuring various stakeholders in the 7/7 memorial project to analyse the relationship between memorial space and material relations. We develop an approach to organizational space as an unfinished meshwork that folds together wanted and unwanted memory, making the historical a matter of ongoing live concern but with the absence of a permanent guiding narrative

Humanitarian remains: erasure and the everyday of camp life in Northern Uganda

The impacts of protracted displacement can be understood through the spatial and material afterlives of war. In the context of Northern Uganda, the experiences of conflict that are interpreted in memorialisation are often reflected of how governments and aid agencies administered life during war. This article examines leftover aid rations, archives, former displacement camp sites and even unmarked graves as evidence to better understand what happens when people try to return "to normal"after decades of war between the Government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army. It asks what narrative and material erasure implies for survivors who seek to create memorials to reflect on the war and have come to find that the past has been destroyed. Understanding how forgetting occurs, whether intentional or not, illuminates the difficulty of using archival material or artefacts as tools for remembrance projects. The article undertakes an examination of the everyday experiences of displacement and traces of aid assistance to show how memorial efforts can better make sense the past in the present

Organizational Forgetting/Unlearning: The Dark Side of the Absorptive Capacity

Postprint (published version

Oblivionism

The book offers a fundamental view on the problem of forgetting in sociology in general and within sociology of knowledge. Furthermore it focuses – as a case study – on the field of modern science. With recourse to the term ‚oblivionism‘, originally introduced with ironic-critical intent by the german romance scholar Harald Weinrich, it analyzes the fundamental and multifaceted problem of the loss of knowledge in the field of science. A declarative-reflective, an incorporated-practical and an objectified-technical memory motif is at the centre. These form the basis for the development of the three forms of forgetting that are also central to modern science: forgetfulness, wanting to forget and, ultimately, making one forget

Organizational Memory Studies

This paper provides an overview and discussion of the rapidly growing literature on organizational memory studies (OMS). We define OMS as an inquiry into the ways that remembering and forgetting shape, and are shaped by, organizations and organizing processes. The contribution of this article is threefold. We briefly review what we understand by organizational memory and explore some key debates and points of contestation in the field. Second, we identify four different perspectives that have been developed in OMS (functional, interpretive, critical and performative) and expand upon each perspective by showcasing articles published over the past decade. In particular, we examine four papers previously published in Organization Studies to show the distinctiveness of each perspective. Finally, we identify a number of areas for future research to facilitate the future development of OMS

Haunting Sufis and the Also-Here of Migration in Berlin

This article delves into the spectral and affective reserves of Zikr, the Sufi exercise of godly remembrance. It explores how performances of religious longing broaden the moral experience of a post-migrant Berlin by offering contemporary believers critically thin zones of hypersocial contact with Islamic holy figures. Zikr emerges as a key interface of felt and material worlds: through acts of remembrance, subliminal figures and migrant inheritances are made contemporaneous while suppressed civic-political matters find a spectral, more-than-visual presence in Berlin. Sufi haunting thus achieves, amid enduring conditions of migration, a provisional positioning of the not-here and the not-now as an also-here. Such remembrance affords migrants a greater awareness of being distinctly historical as well as the critical means to look past conditions of the present

From Countermemory to Collective Memory: Acknowledging the “Mississippi Burning” Murders

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111921/1/socf12182.pd