Papers by Thomas Van de Putte
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2023
What do Sociolinguistics and Memory Studies have in common, and why should they be interested in ... more What do Sociolinguistics and Memory Studies have in common, and why should they be interested in each other? What are the likely obstacles to their interaction? How could they be overcome? And what are the potential rewards? This conversation between an interactional sociolinguist (Ben) and a memory scholar (Thomas) notes from the outset that while sociolinguistics (Slx) can enrich memory studies’ growing interest in mundane practice, Memory Studies (MS) can enhance increasing sociolinguistic attention to the communicative significance of exceptional, traumatic and violent events. This potential complementarity runs, though, into quite substantial differences in ‘analytical culture’. One tradition leans towards respectful curation (MS), the other towards irreverant ‘myth-busting’ (Slx). While one attends hermaneutically to the after-life of events in narratives, archives etc. (MS), the other captures, somewhat ‘positivistically’, the ongoing enactment of society across a plurality of genres in the factualities of recorded data (Slx). And while one handles material of considerable public interest, often surrounded by legal and ritual discourses (MS), the other works hard at amplifying the (bureaucratic, educational etc) consequentiality of what’s generally taken for granted (Slx). To facilitate the conversation between them, data-sessions focused on short recordings of interaction are a powerful resource, stimulating a plurality of abductive inferences that not only draw on theories from each but also hold them both to account in the data on hand. The Slx/MS encounter can of course lead in a lot of different directions, but for one of us, it offers a way of thickening the sociolinguistic analysis of (in)securitisation as a mode of governance, setting reverence next to suspicion, commemoration of the past alongside fear for the future, and for the other, it opens up an action-oriented Memory Studies, adding an extra dimension to the analysis of inter-scalar processes.
Memory Studies, 2021
This article presents the results of a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute conversation between... more This article presents the results of a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute conversation between a research participant and a researcher. The talk in the interaction concerns the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oświęcim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and concepts from interactional sociology and linguistic ethnography, the article demonstrates that people know different cultural narratives about the same past event and are able to move between those narratives when the interactional context requires them to. The combination of micro-discourse analysis with ethnographic detail provides an insight in the entanglement of general cultural meanings and specific interactional dynamics when people attribute meaning to the past. The findings and methodological framework presented in this article also engage in a dialogue with some fundamental critiques on the field of memory studies. These include, among others, the need to connect the micro, meso, and macro, and the individual with the social, and the urge to actively develop and think through methods in memory studies research.
Narrative Inquiry
Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. Firs... more Memory studies has, in only a few decades, produced insights in two inter-related processes. First, memory scholars theorized how representations of the past become socially shared. Secondly, they theorized how these cultural and collective memories circulate and are being re-actualized in different contexts. But critiques of the field have targeted the metaphorical and reified nature of cultural memory concepts. This article argues that some concepts developed in social scientific narrative studies could provide cultural memory scholars with a precise and less metaphorical vocabulary to understand how people make sense of non-autobiographical pasts in different interactional contexts. In particular, the article focusses on how positioning theory and unexplained events in narrative pre-construction assist analysis of the flexibility of the remembering self in everyday interaction. The examples in this article concern narrations of the Second World War and Holocaust gathered during f...
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2021
This paper shows that aggregated forms of memory, be they cultural or collective, can be reconcep... more This paper shows that aggregated forms of memory, be they cultural or collective, can be reconceptualised as less stable than they have been hitherto assumed to be. The ‘frames’ (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994) or ‘schemata’ (Erll, 2011, 2014) that people employ to attribute meaning to the past are multiple, ever-changing and constantly re-actualised in everyday interactions. The paper presents a qualitative micro-study of a 3-minute spoken interaction between a research participant and a researcher, focusing on the past of the contemporary Polish town of Oswiecim, internationally better known as Auschwitz. Borrowing methods and concepts from interactional sociology and linguistic ethnography, the paper demonstrates that people know different narratives about the same past event and are able to move between those narratives when the interactional context requires them to. The combination of micro-discourse analysis with ethnographic detail provides an insight into the flexibility of the remembering self in interpersonal interaction, and the paper’s findings and methodological framework engage in a dialogue with some fundamental critiques in the field of memory studies. These include, among others, the need to connect the micro, meso and macro, and the individual with the social (Kansteiner, 2010; Keightley, Pickering, Bisht 2019; Gensburger, 2016), and the urge to actively develop and think through methods in memory studies research (Kansteiner, 2002; Keightley and Pickering 2013; Roediger and Wertsch, 2008).
Holocaust Studies A Journal of Culture and History, 2019
Holocaust Studies A Journal of Culture and History , 2019
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Papers by Thomas Van de Putte
Books by Thomas Van de Putte