Staying on Topic: Doing Research Between Improvisation and Systematisation

Abstract

Collective memory—the lay representations of history—has been shown to encourage the glorification of the past of the group by proposing biased and one-sided perspectives on history. These narratives are then mobilized in public discourses to defend, for instance, conflicts. Understanding how some people come to challenge hegemonic representations of the past is thus a critical issue. However, current research on collective memory has been blind to these questions, mainly because it has primarily focused on group dynamics and showed little interest in how people relate to history. This study thus aims to answer two questions: (1) how do people develop a specific relation to the past and (2) how do they come to challenge existing representations of history? It took me almost a year of transcribing and analysing the data to see how interesting the interviews were on their own, not just as an introduction to a subsequent research. As it should be the case, the questions evolved with the data, interests changed and issues were redefined. As a result, new field works emerged; new theories were proposed. And until I started writing this paper, I had actually forgotten what it was that I was so convinced I would find in Brussels. In the next section is what the study now looks like, in a manner similar to how it has been presented in the scientific publications that followed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)