Memory Objects Dr.

Will Kurlikus
Topic:
Oklahoma
Memory
Community
Oklahoma
Food: What
community?
New Wave
Oklahoman Food
• Look at modern restaurants that claim to be a recovery
of Oklahoman local food: nonesuch, Packards, etc.
• How do chefs refer to the food and how do reviewers
refer to the food using memories of Oklahoma. What
traditions are included and which are left out?
• How do these chef’s generate a sense of Oklahoma’s
future—by drawing upon it’s past? Whose included and
excluded from that future?
Who else is studying this? How does my work
relate?

• “oklahoma food memory”

• “food and critical regionalism”
• “food and memory”
• “Oklahoma contemporary food”
 How to Study a Community of Memory
1. Your first step needs to be cataloguing community memories (e.g., quotes from its members) and tracing themes across them. (so
choose your community + your general topic/theme: OU football + traditions)
2. Your second step should be choosing an instance, a moment in time, that your studying to narrow your scope (OU football
memories in response to covid; the release of a new video game; the US women’s soccer team 2019): what are they using
memories to respond to?
3. Next narrow down your artifacts: What are this community’s central ways of remembering? Which artifacts, speeches, and texts are
you studying? What are the trends of remembering across them? Narrow and justify your scope: I’ll be analyzing these three videos
because…they were the most watched, most reported on, from the most famous coach, etc.
4. Then trace specific repeated memories: What are this community’s god memories? Memories repeated again and again as the
ideal that we should return to. (and, conversely, devil memories—memories that we don’t want to return to)
5. Analyze those memories for a worldview: How do this community’s memories represent their epistemology (their way of knowing
the world?)
6. What is this community doing with memories? (making an argument, protecting itself in times of chaos, bringing voice to the
voiceless)
7. How do outsiders view this community? (how does this community respond to critiques of their memories)
8. Are there cracks in the community where members contradict themselves or fight? What does they tell us about?
• Tie in your secondary theory—I’m writing about “football traditions and memory studies”, “video game advertisements,” “adult Disney
fandom,” “nostalgia in response to tragedy,” “the key attributes of tradition” so I need to do a google scholar search.
 Midterm Requirements
• 6 pages double-spaced (not including works cited)
• Includes at least 4 quotes from academic readings about your topic
• Includes numerous primary quotes and examples (they don’t have to be interview quotes)
• Identifies a key memory framework (nostalgia, advertising and memory, activist memory,
countermemory, sports traditions, etc.) you’re working in
• Topic: Describes how a community uses memory to rhetorically shape the world—looks at and
quotes actual memories not just vague assumed memories
• Scope: what artifacts are you going to analyze to represent your whole? You have to narrow it
down and you have to justify your narrowing. I’m going to focus on NBA memories (no, you’re
going to focus on GOAT memories comparing Jordan and James to see the types of
memories each cite and what arguments about the players’ skill compared to their character
each fan quotes).
• Analysis: How are these communities using memory? Your essay should be quote/example
driven not you musing but you analyzing actual examples.
In this essay I’ll
examine the ways In this essay I’ll examine how three
contemporary Oklahoman chefs (Bobby
that x community Glasso, Thomas Crutch, and Sharon
McGovern) use memories of

uses y memories
“traditional” Oklahoman cuisine (from
cowboy faire to indigenous gardens) to
argue what the future of Oklahoman
to make cuisine should look like.

argument z.
What is your most
meaningful object?
The Meaning of Things

• in 1977 we inter- viewed members of 82 families living in the

Chicago Metropolitan Area.
• "What are the things in your home which are special to you?"
• Why was furniture the most mentioned? What does furniture
mean? (use value vs. identity value)
• “They are the first two chairs me and my husband ever bought, and we sit
in them and I just associate them with my home and having babies and
sitting in the chairs with babies.” (60)
• Coded self (and kinship) + memory (and community)