Long Memories: Material Rhetoric as Evidence of Memory and a Potential Future

Abstract

Residents of Gifford Park have used memories of the past—characterizing this place as violent—to celebrate their present place and identity. Whereas memory scholars have highlighted how people remember the past in nostalgic, idealized ways to cope with an uncertain present and future, this case study illustrates how remembering the past as especially dangerous grounds material changes for an idealized present and can assuage guilty feelings for a potentially-gentrified future. Additionally, I show how long-term field work can reveal slowly unfolding patterns of material rhetoric that shape the identity of community members and impact the narratives that they construct.

Keywords:

• Field Methods
• Gentrification
• Memory
• Neighborhoods
• Rhetoric

Manuscript History/Grant Information

Earlier versions of this paper were presented the Conference on Communication and the Environment in June of 2017 and at an invited talk at North Dakota State University in February of 2018. I would like to thank Creighton University’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship for their generous support of this project through a Summer Faculty Research Fellowship in 2017.

Acknowledgments

I want to recognize and thank Mitchell D. Torkelson for his work conducting and transcribing interviews, Robert C. Rowland for his guidance with the revisions of this essay, and Dave Tell and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Creighton's Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship.