About the Project and Book

Memory in the Head and in the Wild:
Interdisciplinarity in Memory Studies

is our book in progress, contracted to Oxford University Press for publication in 2021.

Authored by Amanda J. Barnier, Professor of Cognitive Science and a Chief Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

and Andrew Hoskins, Professor and Interdisciplinary Research Chair in Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland.

We met over a decade ago as founding Editors of the SAGE journal, Memory Studies. From our work together establishing and promoting the journal, and from our individual research programs, we have a deep understanding of both every day and scholarly puzzles about memory. We also appreciate the distinct disciplinary perspectives on memory offered by cognitive and experimental sciences and social sciences and humanities as well as the challenges of their interdisciplinary intersection.

Our work forges a new and bold interdisciplinary agenda for the field of Memory Studies via a deep critical dialogue that connects the human and the social/cultural study of memory.

A definition of interdisciplinary we find useful is taken from Hoskins and Tulloch:

Entering dialogue about… different critical assumptions is essential to interdisciplinary work. Interdisciplinarity is about interrogation in dialogue between these critical assumptions, and achieving some pathway forward as a result. Some researchers refer to a multidisci­plinary project as an adding together of the advantages of different disciplin­ary approaches. But that is not our understanding of “interdisciplinary.” To be interdisciplinary is, for us, to engage in dialogue between different paradigms of thought and between their attached concepts (Hoskins & Tulloch, 2016, 12).

Consistent with this view, our research is based on a dialogue; not just between ourselves, but that between ourselves and many contributors to the cognitive, cultural and social study of memory, themselves located across an array of disciplines, cultures and countries. To this end we are undertaking a series of discussions and interviews with junior and senior students and scholars that inform our unique dialogic critique of two distinct fields that study memory.