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Relational Remembering and Oppression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Christine M. Koggel
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Abstract

This paper begins by discussing Sue Campbell's account of memory as she first developed it in Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars and applied it to the context of the false memory debates. In more recent work, Campbell was working on expanding her account of relational remembering from an analysis of personal rememberings to activities of public rememberings in contexts of historic harms and, specifically, harms to Aboriginals and their communities in Canada. The goal of this paper is to draw out the moral and political implications of Campbell's account of relational remembering and thereby to extend its reach and application. As applied to Aboriginal communities, Campbell's account of relational remembering confirms but also explains the important role that Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (IRS TRC) is poised to play. It holds this promise and potential, however, only if all Canadians, Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal, engage in a process of remembering that is relational and has the goal of building and rebuilding relationships. The paper ends by drawing attention to what relational remembering can teach us about oppression more generally.

Type
Cluster: In Relation: Exploring the Work of Sue Campbell
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 493 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

Over more than two decades, I benefited enormously from Sue Campbell's work and from the rich philosophical conversations we had together. She was skillful in building on the work of others to defend her arguments and generous in acknowledging insights she borrowed from unexpected places. The examples she used come to life because in the ordinary and everyday she found ways to think creatively about philosophical concepts such as integrity, memory, emotion, and oppression and to locate their meaning in personal relationships and in the network of relationships that shaped her and those around her. She was the person she described in the many examples she used to illustrate what it is to live a life with meaning, integrity, and respect for others. Her account of relational remembering came to life for me in memories of our reremembering together to make sense of relationships, events, our lives, and social and political issues. I hope that this paper is faithful to her project of wanting to get memory right; to the useful feedback from Hypatia reviewers and from Alison Wylie; and to the memories shaped in and through relationships I continue to have with Ami Harbin, Rockney Jacobsen, Sue Sherwin, Alexis Shotwell, and Jan Sutherland.

References

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