Collaborative Interpreting Practice in Developing a Conceptual Boundary Object: The Case of Social Memory Infrastructures

In this paper the authors introduce the interpretation challenge of an ongoing research project where he and his collaborator are proposing the concept of social memory infrastructures (SMIs). SMIs are sociotechnical systems patched and adapted to serve the purposes of memory activism: symbolically redress victims by acknowledging their experiences, educating the public about past violence, and holding perpetrators accountable. The interpretation challenge in defining SMIs stem from the differences in the objects of study in social memory studies and infrastructure studies. Both fields are concerned with knowledge, but of a different nature. While infrastructure studies are concerned with knowledge produced by technoscience, memory studies are concerned with social memory, a kind of knowledge about the past that exists in connection with, but different from, history. While prior work has already explored how social memories shape people's experiences of physical infrastructures, this project is the first to articulate the opposite problem: how infrastructures shape social memory. This notion of SMIs expand upon an emerging set of research concerned with bridging the gaps between memory studies and infrastructure studies.