This is an introductory writing-and-thinking course that explores how societies remember and forget—not as a “natural” process, but as a set of political, institutional, cultural, and technological practices. The course is built around a curated set of short theoretical and practice-oriented texts, which are read together in class and treated not as authorities to be mastered, but as tools for thinking and writing.
Rather than focusing on lectures or content delivery, the course treats reading as a shared analytical act and writing as a method of inquiry. Each session combines close reading, guided discussion, and structured individual or collaborative writing. Participants are invited to translate concepts into their own professional languages and contexts—archives, museums, classrooms, digital platforms, activist documentation, and public history projects.
The central premise of the course is simple: forgetting is rarely just absence. It is often the result of deliberate or implicit choices—selection, classification, description, design, funding, law, infrastructure, and power. From archival appraisal decisions and exhibition scripts to platform policies, algorithms, and interface defaults, memory is continuously produced, limited, and reshaped. This course asks not only how this happens, but how we, as practitioners, participate in it.

Who this course is for:
The course is designed for people who work with memory “in the wild,” including:
Archivists and records professionals (institutional, community-based, and independent)
Digital activists, civic technologists, and web/social-media archivists
Historians and oral history practitioners
Educators working with contested or difficult pasts
Museum workers, curators, and memorial or site interpreters

No prior background in theory or memory studies is assumed. The course is explicitly designed to be accessible to practitioners, while remaining conceptually rigorous.