Teaching Political Science through Memory Work

Abstract

In this article, we present the results of a research project where we have tried to elaborate more socially inclusive ways of teaching and learning political science by making use of a specific feminist method of analyzing social relations—memory work. As a method, memory work involves writing and interpreting stories of personal experience, written in relation to a specific theme. The theme we worked with was gender and nation. The article compares memory work to more conventional educational approaches to this specific theme. By focusing on experience and everyday life, we claim that memory work can challenge conventional and gendered understandings of how academic knowledge is produced and what is deemed to be part of the political sphere. We discuss how memory work can open up different forms of knowledge and new ways of learning. At the same time, we put forth the problems encountered and the resistance among the students we worked with. By analyzing the reactions and processes that were initiated by the memory work, we discuss both how gender and nationalism are reproduced and incorporated into understandings of what counts as proper political science and point out under what circumstances these conventional notions can be challenged.