ABSTRACT
Within memory work, which was first used by a group of feminist researchers and scholars, amongst them Frigga Haug and her colleagues, there is a continual underlying conflict between the radical and the conservative, between memories of the past, inevitably tinged with a degree of nostalgia, and a need to find in this past keys to the locks that constrain our actions, and our sense of self, in the present. Their exploratory work led them to the method of starting from their writing of stories about situations or events which they had experienced in the
course of their lives. From this starting point, Frigga Haug argues that it is important to work historically if we want to find out the social construction, the mechanisms, connections and meanings of our actions and feelings. It became crucial, however, to ensure that memories of everyday life not be seen through an individual perspective but be rendered in a form that encouraged a different form of analysis. As a first step, the group chose to work collectively on their written sketches. The emphasis is equally emphatic on each word: collective, memory and work. For Haug (1990:47) the result is a necessary, enjoyable, new, great social research methodology.
