Chapter 11: Collaborative Remembering Sequences

Remembering in the wild (Brown & Reavey, this volume) occurs in situated interactions embedded in social and material environments. It unfolds while interacting with various types of artefacts, from desktop computers and laptops, to notes, diagrams and sketches drawn quickly and spontaneously in post-its, notebooks, and so forth. In addition, we also remember in collaboration with other people in a wide range of settings and interactional contexts. Remembering in the wild is ubiquitous, highly situated and driven by a history of interactions (Brown & Reavey, this volume). After being part of particular social and material environments for a period of time, we already know where to look to find the information we cannot recall, or whom to ask. In other words, remembering in the wild is also based on routines and patterns, which after a while become second nature to us. Thus, remembering in the real world becomes action, relying on interactions with artifacts and other people. The type of interactions in which collaboration in remembering occurs are multimodal and involve the coordination of social, cognitive, bodily, and material resources over time (Bietti & Sutton, 2015). Remembering in the wild means recalling together shared and distributed past experiences. Hence, the study of the ways in which people remember needs to build from units of analysis “that cuts across the distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, knower and tool” (Brown & Reavey, this volume, p. 17). This means adopting a systematic approach to collaborative remembering which takes into consideration the significant role played by the social (e.g., other people) and material (e.g., artifacts) ecologies in memory collaboration.