Chapter 13: Family Memory Work: Reframing Narrative Inheritances Toward Racial Justice

This chapter focuses on family inquiry as an important form of memory work and vehicle for contributing to racial reckoning and justice. Family inquiry and methodology are terms I use to refer to a vibrant body of life writing approaches (e.g., Bailey, 2009, 2016; Bailey & Norquay 2017; Norquay & Bailey, 2018). Although entire trajectories of research in psychology, anthropology, and sociology focus on family structures and roles, I use the term, family inquiry, specifically to refer broadly to researchers’ focus on their own family members as sites of inquiry. I envelop diverse forms of inquiry within this label, regardless of how authors classify their projects. Developments in qualitative methodology over decades have nurtured the conditions for researchers to consider their ancestors, living relatives, and extended kinship networks as meaningful and legitimate sites of exploration. These developments have also expanded the varied approaches available to do so and raised productive methodological questions for life writing about how to undertake the work: “What is the purpose for studying one’s own family?”; “What questions surface that are salient personally, methodologically, or socially?”; “Which relative or family characteristics and actions are compelling to study—through which epistemological or theoretical lenses, and why?”; “What are the ethical implications of doing so?”