Project: Remembering in the wild: towards a cognitive pragmatics of collective remembering

(Postdoctoral project 2011-2013)

KWI-Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen
in collaboration with Alan Cienki and VU University Amsterdam

Shared and distributed collective memories are utilized to create a feeling of connection and maintain a consistent feeling of identity among group members. Intimate people are strategically engaged in processes of remembering and forgetting, which are modeled according to the specific goals of a particular interaction. In these cases, members of groups construct a distributed socio-cognitive system, which is shaped by the physical and social environment in which they are located. This socio-cognitive system enables intimate people to connect, interrelate and manage individual and collective memories which are distributed among them and form part of shared past experiences. The aim of this project is to explore the ways in which a individual and collective memories are interactionally re-constructed and coordinated between family members and close friends in real-time multimodal interactions.