Refocusing memory studies: the mnemonic imagination and remembering well. Memory studies has distinguished itself through its attention to large-scale collective remembering, especially of spectacular events and ruptures. This has included a concern for the ways in which shared pasts are communicated and produced a significant body of studies critiquing the hegemonic purposes to which the past is put, whether in national political discourse or in mass-mediated representation. Some of the most significant historical events of the 20th and 21st centuries have been considered in this way, from the memorialisation of the Cambodian genocide to the mnemonic commodification of terrorist atrocities. This has had two major consequences: firstly, a largely negative emphasis in memory studies on painful pasts and the failures and flaws of popular remembering; secondly, a diminution of attention to what happens at vernacular (meso) levels and personal and small group (micro) levels of memory work. In our talk we use our concept of the mnemonic imagination to redress this imbalance through a twin focus on vernacular memory and remembering well.
