Kristine Bagge Kousholt
One might say that utopia is already part of Memory-work. Frigga Haug has previously emphasized that memory ‘contains both hope and giving up and that memory is constantly written anew’ (Haug 2008, p. 538).
As utopian methodologies, Memory-work is about producing alternative forms of knowledge and practices that might challenge dominating, hegemonic structures and support equality, as Frigga Haug puts it:
“In this respect asking ‘how it really happened’, as an everyday form of looking for ‘truth’, is rather a hindrance to our work, precisely because the question about domination and submission is not asked. In Memory Work, the process of producing an image, or what we could call the production of the imaginary, is central.” (Haug 2008, p. 538)
In this way, Memory-work is both about remembering and envisioning possible hopeful futures. However, ‘utopia’ should not be understood as an idealistic and unrealistic goal but an ongoing process where the movements and envisioning itself contains utopian moments (Levitas, 2013; Rajala, Cole & Esteban-Guitart 2023). It is the hypothesis that when working in the dialectics between the past, the present and the future, traditional linear temporalities are transgressed, and this transgression itself may be part of developing well-being together. We will remember possible futures together.
Memory-work and utopian methodologies might merge very well.
In my contribution at the Symposium I will draw on the experiences in a project that seeks to combine Memory-work with novel developments of ‘utopian methodologies’. The purpose of this is to generate a fruitful methodology that concurrently both examines and develops youth well-being in alternative educational practices concretized as the Danish Boarding school (‘Efterskole’). At the same time, it is the aspiration to engage young people at boarding school as co-researchers in this endeavor which aligns well with the ambition of collective memory-work.
Danish boarding schools ‘efterskoler’ are an alternative school form for young people entering 8th, 9th, or 10th grade level (app. 14-16 years of age). The school form is private, yet it receives significant economic support from the state. The school started as an alternative to the established school system. Inspired from the Danish author, priest, and philosopher, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872), the school was from the start set up to be the opposite to the traditional ‘rote learning’ focused on the exam. Instead, it focused on the ‘whole person’ inviting creativity, fantasy, bodily expressions, experiences and dialogue with the point of departure that both the student and the teacher are in learning positions and learn from one another.
With this point of departure, the Danish ‘efterskole’ is considered a potential ‘utopian practice’ that might hold possible answers to the current problems of well-being among young people in Denmark. It has for instance been concluded that the well-being of young people in the age span of 15-19 years has declined during the past 12 years (Ottosen et al. 2022).
At the Symposium I will present the project sketched above and the methodological ambition in more detail. The discussion afterwards offers the chance for a critical examination of CMW as a utopian practice, and in particular the question of its applicability with young students in their teens.
References:
Haug, F. (2008). Memory Work. Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 23, No. 58
Levitas, R. (2013). Utopia as method: The imaginary reconstitution of society. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ottosen, M. H., Andreasen, A. G., Dahl, K. M., Lausten, M., Rayce, S. B., & Tagmose, B. B. (2022). Børn og unge i Danmark: Velfærd og trivsel 2022. VIVE
Rajala, A., Cole, M., & Esteban-Guitart, M. (2023). Utopian methodology: Researching educational interventions to promote equity over multiple timescales. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 110-136.
Kristine Bagge Kousholt, Associate professor in Educational Psychology, DPU, Aarhus University
https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/kristine-bagge-kousholt/publications/
During and since my PhD, my research interests have focused in different ways on children and young people’s perspectives on testing and assessments in education; how testing and assessment are part of everyday school practice and become part of children and young people’s communities and processes of social self-understandings. In this way, I have mostly explored testing and assessment from a critical psychological perspective. From this point of departure, I have extended my research to include among others; the concept of motivation and how children are expected to be motivated in certain ways to perform testing in ‘the right manner’; problems of wellbeing and how this is related to individualization and aspects of temporality and acceleration; and development of creative assessment as part of the Danish ‘Efterskole’. With a background in studying Danish literature (and literature/fiction in general), I’m interested in how alternative, aesthetic and poetic genres can be combined with both assessment genres and academic genres and how this can be fruitful in relation to youth wellbeing. I see Collective memory-work as a genre-crossing knowledge production that has the potential of disrupting linear temporality and in this way may also produce hopefulness and wellbeing.