Pakeha Women Investigate Adolescence: Doing Memory-Work with Friends
Abstract
VI Pakeha Women Investigate Adolescence: Doing Memory-work with Friends Heather HAMERTON In recent years a number of researchers in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia have conducted research using memory-work (for example, Crawford et al., 1992; Friend, 1996; Semp, 1994; Stephenson et al., 1996). Memory-work is a feminist research method that enables researchers to make explicit the ways in which experiences and identities are constructed within particular socio-cultural settings. My research has used memory-work to investigate the adolescent experiences of a group of Pakehal New Zealand women who went to school together in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to see how past experiences are impli- cated in women's present understandings of themselves. In this article I intend to discuss only one aspect of my project: doing memory-work with friends. Other memory-work groups have been friends as adults (for example, Irving, 1998; Koutroulis, 1993), but in my project the participants had also been friends as teenagers. This article explores some of the tensions I identified in conducting memory-work research with women who knew one another during the time about which memories are written. I will not describe memory-work method here because it has been fully described elsewhere (for example, Crawford