Painful memories as mnemonic resources: Grand Canyon Dories and the protection of place
Painful memories as mnemonic resources: Grand Canyon Dories and the protection of place
Organizations commonly regard memories of pain and destruction as being unwanted. In this article, we consider the largely undertheorized potential that painful pasts can have for building a mnemonic community. We draw primarily on oral history interviews to explore how Martin Litton and Grand Canyon Dories use sensory, discursive, and material-discursive modalities to convert painful memories into mnemonic resources through the performance of three practices: sensitizing, retelling, and reincarnating. Their aim was to protect the Grand Canyon for future generations. We advance research on organizational uses of the past by theorizing how painful memories can be converted into mnemonic resources. Specifically, we underscore the untapped potential of organizations repackaging history-at-large to curate experiences of the past using combinations of semiotic modalities and remembering practices. We call this multimodal remembering. We also contribute to research on place by illustrating how destroyed natural wonders that no longer exist in their geological corporeal form can be transposed across time and space and become re-embodied in new phantasmatic forms.
custodianship, environment, Grand Canyon, multimodal remembering, multimodality, painful memories, place, uses of the past
51-79
Crawford, Brett
a9d4e2eb-6b6a-4ffd-8fd6-5a93d44d01b0
Coraiola, Diego M.
31e45891-a0a2-4f0d-8625-977336c832b9
Dacin, M. Tina
45d3a07d-dffe-4ebb-8536-84b0fbf947f8
February 2022
Crawford, Brett
a9d4e2eb-6b6a-4ffd-8fd6-5a93d44d01b0
Coraiola, Diego M.
31e45891-a0a2-4f0d-8625-977336c832b9
Dacin, M. Tina
45d3a07d-dffe-4ebb-8536-84b0fbf947f8
Crawford, Brett, Coraiola, Diego M. and Dacin, M. Tina
(2022)
Painful memories as mnemonic resources: Grand Canyon Dories and the protection of place.
Strategic Organization, 20 (1), .
(doi:10.1177/1476127020981353).
Abstract
Organizations commonly regard memories of pain and destruction as being unwanted. In this article, we consider the largely undertheorized potential that painful pasts can have for building a mnemonic community. We draw primarily on oral history interviews to explore how Martin Litton and Grand Canyon Dories use sensory, discursive, and material-discursive modalities to convert painful memories into mnemonic resources through the performance of three practices: sensitizing, retelling, and reincarnating. Their aim was to protect the Grand Canyon for future generations. We advance research on organizational uses of the past by theorizing how painful memories can be converted into mnemonic resources. Specifically, we underscore the untapped potential of organizations repackaging history-at-large to curate experiences of the past using combinations of semiotic modalities and remembering practices. We call this multimodal remembering. We also contribute to research on place by illustrating how destroyed natural wonders that no longer exist in their geological corporeal form can be transposed across time and space and become re-embodied in new phantasmatic forms.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 28 December 2020
Published date: February 2022
Keywords:
custodianship, environment, Grand Canyon, multimodal remembering, multimodality, painful memories, place, uses of the past
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 504317
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/504317
ISSN: 1476-1270
PURE UUID: 8474c39c-beac-420c-b1a4-8eeebeffc386
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Date deposited: 04 Sep 2025 16:38
Last modified: 20 Sep 2025 02:29
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Contributors
Author:
Brett Crawford
Author:
Diego M. Coraiola
Author:
M. Tina Dacin
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