Joint remembering: Cognition, communication and interaction in processes of memory-making

Abstract

This article provides a new cognitive- and discourse-based theory to memory research. Despite the fact that a large proportion of studies in memory research are based on investigations of (interactional) cognitive and discourse processes, neither linguistics nor cognitive and social psychologists have proposed an integrative, interdisciplinary and discursive-based theory to memory research. In this article I explore how groups of people who did not know each other jointly coordinate the interlocking of their individual experiences during a period of dictatorship and their self-positioning in the here and now. The interlocking of autobiographical memories is performed by discourse strategies such as agreements and corrections, which are dependent on the participants’ shifting representations of the communicative interaction. The conversations were about personal experiences related to the 1976–83 military dictatorship in Argentina.