Rob Wilson: I want to say something a little more
 constructive about one of the main 
notions at least in the title, that 
of collective memory. So, in the 
academy the notion of collective 
memory is one of those kind of buzz 
notions that has really taken off in 
the last 10 years, particularly, most
prominently in Holocaust studies. 
This is a picture of a sort of wall of 
photographs at the Holocaust museum 
in Washington I was at about a year and 
a half ago. More generally in history 
and sociology in the study of 
nationalism, there's a lot of focus
 on this idea of memories of 
collectives, of groups that have identities
 that are ongoing and regulated
by the particular forms of memory that 
they engage in, particular kinds of 
commemorative activities they use to
 regulate themselves. There have been 
other, in some sense less politically 
loaded contexts in which this talk of 
collective memory has taken off. Phil 
Petitt, for example, talks about 
legal and corporate contexts in which 
you have high level institutional 
decision-making that he wants to claim 
we need to invoke the notion of a
sort of group mind or collective mind 
that's got a memory component to it, 
but there is some decision making. 
There's another kind of putative group 
mental ability and also in discussion 
of collective intelligence. There's a
longer sort of tradition that goes 
back to the very foundations of social
science in the work of Durkheim, 
and also picked up in some of the 
earliest work that we might 
retrospectively identify as 
philosophy of 
biology on social insect colonies 
coming out of Harvard in the early 
part of the 20th century.
I'm interested in not just collective
 memory as a construct and how we 
think about it, I mean, I am interested 
in that, but not only that. I'm 
interested in the particular sorts 
of practices of collective memory or 
remembering. Okay. And here it's the
 idea, it's not the individual doing 
the acts of remembering, or if it 
is the individuals they're in a 
particular sort of social context 
and that context is not just some 
incidental feature of the forms of 
remembering they engage in. Those forms
are, if you like, intrinsically 
constituted by the particular social 
context in which they take place even 
if the activities of individuals, or
whether it is the activity of groups 
themselves that we think of as being 
the subjects of memory here. I think 
there's a lot to be said and I've 
learned in part what I do know about 
this from the work of Sue Campbell at 
Dalhousie, though I don't think she 
puts things in quite as psychoanalytic 
way as I have framed here. Thinking 
about remembering with a certain kind 
of social recognition, with a certain 
kind of social stamp of authority on
it, as a kind of working through 
for a community to sort of revisit 
traumatic events in the past in some 
way that has a constructive outcome 
because of that very activity of remembering. 
So it's modeled on the case 
of the individual and working through 
some traumatic event through 
psychotherapeutic interventions. 
But the idea is we can apply that kind of 
model over to thinking about what 
might happen in a social context of 
remembering. That's a way to characterize
 the practice of collective 
memory. And of course if you think 
about it with that analogy in mind, many 
of these forms of group remembering 
at the group level are going to be 
difficult. They're going to involve, 
they're going to be very emotional, 
they're going to be very charged, 
they're going to involve, in some cases,
rightful embitterment... people are 
going to be sort of pissed off because 
of the way in which they were treated 
and going through that process of 
working through communally in a semi- 
or fully-public way is going to 
involve basically a lot of tears, a 
lot of hurt, a lot of painful reliving. 
But at the same time, at least as I 
see it, and I think as it's developed 
in a lot of communities in which this 
is being practiced, and I think you 
can pick your own favorite sorts of 
examples here, it also leads to a kind
of self-affirmation. In some cases 
it may be the only way to exercise that 
kind of self-affirmation and to 
recover oneself and move to forward.
So, you might think in Canada, the 
sort of process that is on people's 
minds recently since the summer 
apology, the Residential School's 
Commission, Sue Campbell herself has 
worked directly as a philosopher 
advising and writing for the Residential 
Schools Commission in the native 
community. Another sort of example 
that is brought to mind by the recent 
visit of Sarah Schulman to campus 
is the work of ACTUP New York. Sarah 
Schulman was an activist in the AIDS 
Coalition To Unleash Power in New 
York, in the early 1980s for about 
seven or eight years and over the last
six or seven years she has created 
this oral history project. This is the
website for ACTUP, where she's 
interviewed the 100 remaining living 
members of ACTUP New York. The interviews 
range from about 30 minutes to 
about 4 hours and they're all fully 
available. They're videos on this
website and as transcripts, you can 
download them free or you can get 5
minutes snippets of each of them, or 
you can request the whole lot. And
it's a very powerful way to remember 
not just a social movement but the 
phenomena the social movement was about. 
So it's a kind of archiving sort of 
project, that I think you can fit into 
this model of collective memory.
But, the case that's most on my mind, 
is the history of eugenics in Western 
Canada, and its connection to 
contemporary disability and its study, 
because at the moment I'm engaged in 
a project that is of this type. It's
not well-formed enough to say it's
 taken exactly this direction or that 
direction, but for the last few years 
and that's part of what forming the 
What Sorts Of People Network is 
about, is trying to get academics, 
activists, community members, 
sterilization survivors, members of 
disability organizations together 
around a sort of set of questions and 
issues and concerns that will be 
kind of, that will involve some kind of 
practice of collective memory, and 
they have been involving those practices.
