Concurrent Session 2-C

Location

Bryant Hall, Room 209

Start Date

14-3-2025 1:30 PM

End Date

14-3-2025 2:45 PM

Description

  • Narrative Memorializations
    John Bickle, Mississippi State University and University of Mississippi Medical Center
    An unnoticed form of memorialization is the distinguished awards lecture. These lectures offer the recipient an opportunity to self-reflect on his or her accomplishments, and many take the opportunity to spin a narrative of their own discovery processes. Treating these lectures as “narrative memorializations” reveals creative processes that are idiosyncratic, dramatic and not always in keeping with popular accounts of a field’s methods—especially in lectures memorializing scientific discoeries. This talk will focus exclusively on Nobel Prize lectures by recipients of the annual award for Physiology or Medicine. Instances abound in these lectures of psychological idiosyncrasies that generated major scientific findings: David Hubel’s (1981) recounting of his and Torsten Wiesel’s freak initial discovery of the unexpected receptive field properties of cortical visual neuron; Erwin Neher’s (1991) continual failures to solve the seal problem of the patch clamp using “systematic methods”, and his and Bert Sakmann’s sudden success when they played a hunch; Martin Evans’s and Oliver Smythies’s (2007) remembrances of seat-of-the pants laboratory tinkerings that generated the gene “knock-out” technique in mammalian embryonic stem cells. None of these narratives is translatable into “the scientific method” as enshrined in the early chapters of scientific textbooks. Treating these lectures as “narrative memorializations” also raises a philosophical question. What is being memorialized: the scientific discoveries or the individual scientists’ own processes of discovery? If the latter, this suggests a further step toward contextualization in science studies. For fifty years science studies scholars have grown comfortable acknowledging the impact of broader social, political and historical contexts on scientific practices and findings. Must we now further contextualize scientific discovery to the psychology of individual scientists? Might the structure of DNA be as dependent on the psychological quirks of Watson and Crick as “Stairway to Heaven” is on those of Page and Plant?
  • On The Block: Intergenerational Transmission of Traumatic Mothering Memories, Place, and Way-Making Traditions
    Valandra, Professor of Social Work and African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas
    This genealogical study of intergenerational meaning-making, remembrance, and memorialization—employing oral history interviews, autoethnography, and archival records—examines five generations of Black American mothers who have endured place-based public trauma linked to enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building on Donohoe’s reinterpretation of memory, place, and tradition as a complex and intricately woven palimpsest, I examine how private memories of racialized containment in public historical places shape collective memories of intergenerational remembering, forgetting, and bearing witness, influencing the formation of generational identity and resistance. I explore intergenerational meaning-making through the inheritance of traumatic mothering memories related to the legacies of slavery and segregation. These narratives are passed down through generations via oral traditions of testimony, witnessing, and recollection. They encapsulate both personal and collective experiences of pain and loss, trauma and hope, linking the auction block of slavery to the rural and urban blocks of segregation. Key questions guiding this examination include how place, tradition, and the processes of memory-making and erasure impact the inheritance of intergenerational trauma and resilience; how timing, circumstances, and motivations affect the testimony of painful, shameful, and hopeful mothering narratives; and what role, if any, remembrance and memorialization may play in generational healing, reconciliation, and redemption, both in private and public contexts.
  • Chair: C. Sade Turnipseed, Assistant Professor of History, Jackson State University

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Mar 14th, 1:30 PM Mar 14th, 2:45 PM

Concurrent Session 2-C

Bryant Hall, Room 209

  • Narrative Memorializations
    John Bickle, Mississippi State University and University of Mississippi Medical Center
    An unnoticed form of memorialization is the distinguished awards lecture. These lectures offer the recipient an opportunity to self-reflect on his or her accomplishments, and many take the opportunity to spin a narrative of their own discovery processes. Treating these lectures as “narrative memorializations” reveals creative processes that are idiosyncratic, dramatic and not always in keeping with popular accounts of a field’s methods—especially in lectures memorializing scientific discoeries. This talk will focus exclusively on Nobel Prize lectures by recipients of the annual award for Physiology or Medicine. Instances abound in these lectures of psychological idiosyncrasies that generated major scientific findings: David Hubel’s (1981) recounting of his and Torsten Wiesel’s freak initial discovery of the unexpected receptive field properties of cortical visual neuron; Erwin Neher’s (1991) continual failures to solve the seal problem of the patch clamp using “systematic methods”, and his and Bert Sakmann’s sudden success when they played a hunch; Martin Evans’s and Oliver Smythies’s (2007) remembrances of seat-of-the pants laboratory tinkerings that generated the gene “knock-out” technique in mammalian embryonic stem cells. None of these narratives is translatable into “the scientific method” as enshrined in the early chapters of scientific textbooks. Treating these lectures as “narrative memorializations” also raises a philosophical question. What is being memorialized: the scientific discoveries or the individual scientists’ own processes of discovery? If the latter, this suggests a further step toward contextualization in science studies. For fifty years science studies scholars have grown comfortable acknowledging the impact of broader social, political and historical contexts on scientific practices and findings. Must we now further contextualize scientific discovery to the psychology of individual scientists? Might the structure of DNA be as dependent on the psychological quirks of Watson and Crick as “Stairway to Heaven” is on those of Page and Plant?
  • On The Block: Intergenerational Transmission of Traumatic Mothering Memories, Place, and Way-Making Traditions
    Valandra, Professor of Social Work and African & African American Studies, University of Arkansas
    This genealogical study of intergenerational meaning-making, remembrance, and memorialization—employing oral history interviews, autoethnography, and archival records—examines five generations of Black American mothers who have endured place-based public trauma linked to enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building on Donohoe’s reinterpretation of memory, place, and tradition as a complex and intricately woven palimpsest, I examine how private memories of racialized containment in public historical places shape collective memories of intergenerational remembering, forgetting, and bearing witness, influencing the formation of generational identity and resistance. I explore intergenerational meaning-making through the inheritance of traumatic mothering memories related to the legacies of slavery and segregation. These narratives are passed down through generations via oral traditions of testimony, witnessing, and recollection. They encapsulate both personal and collective experiences of pain and loss, trauma and hope, linking the auction block of slavery to the rural and urban blocks of segregation. Key questions guiding this examination include how place, tradition, and the processes of memory-making and erasure impact the inheritance of intergenerational trauma and resilience; how timing, circumstances, and motivations affect the testimony of painful, shameful, and hopeful mothering narratives; and what role, if any, remembrance and memorialization may play in generational healing, reconciliation, and redemption, both in private and public contexts.
  • Chair: C. Sade Turnipseed, Assistant Professor of History, Jackson State University