Promoting diversity through collective memory work in an historically white university in South Africa
The paper engages with collective memory work as a research and pedagogic activity with students taking a gender studies course in a formerly white university in South Africa. This is an autobiographical research strategy which takes place in a group and involves individuals choosing, writing and sharing stories in relation to an agreed topic, and interpreting their work through comparative and critical inquiry. In their stories gender and race emerged as important sources of identification and dimensions of power in conjunction with belongings and dislocations, pleasures and oppressions. One of the most interesting and striking features of the group became its diversity. We say became because it was by engaging with each other through memory work that participants learnt how different they were, and in what ways they were different, and the significance of these differences not only in terms of the experiences they recounted, but also how they remembered, processed and interpreted these. The diversity of the group was made significant by the collective approach as participants related to each other at different levels; as people who presented their experience, and also questioned their own memories of that experience, who responded to the experience of others by making comparisons. In promoting diversity as a relational experience, collective memory work, the paper argues, may facilitate transformation in historically white universities in South Africa by opening up possibilities of mixing and crossing ‘borders’ defined by race, gender, sexuality, class and age and their intersections, rather than taking these as singular and natural markers of difference and diversity.