Public Learning as

Public Remembering

DR. WILL KURLINKUS

4/10/24 1
Key Question of Literacy and Public
Memory: Who wants whom to
learn/remember what, why, and
how?
Who (the rhetor) wants whom
(the audience) to remember
what (the cultural
standard/ideal), why (the
exigence/motive), and how (the
message/delivery/technology)?
Who wants whom to learn/remember
what, why, and how?
“The groups I am a part of at any time give me the
means to reconstruct them upon condition, to be
sure, that I turn toward them and adopt, at least for
the moment, their way of thinking” (38). —Maurice
Halbwachs
1. Collective memory is
processual: it constantly forms,
clashes, changes, shifts, is
forgotten, and is performed but is
also recorded most strongly at key
points in processes (beginnings
and endings).

Can you think of ways we

celebrate that have changed over
your lifetime or that will soon
change?

89er Day Parade

2. Collective memory is
unpredictable: the ways we
remember events changes
unpredictably and often irrationally
because memory is presentist.

When I say retro what comes to mind?

3 .Collective memory is
partial: no single
memory contains all we
know about the
remembered.

Memory is exclusionary
as well as palimpsestic.

What is a key OU
memory for you?
4. Collective memory is useable: we use
memory to do things (connecting to
people/community, ideas, arguments; selling
products; arguing about laws; normalizing
power; praising and blaming). How is the
past made to matter?

We also mark membership with passkey

memories.
5. Collective memory is
both particular and
universal: we remember
individually in groups
6. Collective memory
is material: we
remember through
things and places.
Oñate’s Foot

• Oñate: A conquistador treated as a founding

father of New Mexico (celebrated at a time
when non-white history was excluded) but
also known for sentencing men in Acoma
Pueblo to having one foot chopped off.
• Who wants whom to remember what,
why, and how?
• How is public literacy occurring here?
Who is controlling the flow of literacy
and public information?
Monument Lab:
National Monument
Audit 1.
2.
3.
4.
How do monuments
serve as points of
public education? As
something else? Do
they really matter?