Memory Studies: Territory and Clusters in the Making

The field of memory studies, rooted in Maurice Halbwachs’s argument in the 1920s that the past is socially constructed, has taken shape in the last three to four decades. Different academic disciplines share a growing interest in understanding how memory functions, how it is constructed, reproduced and used. Scholars have addressed the interdisciplinary character of memory studies in an effort to foster dialogue and interactions beyond already established disciplinary boundaries through conferences, thematic issues and specialized journals. In 1995, communication scholar Barbie Zelizer noted the erasure of disciplinary boundaries as journals in many fields started to publish special issues dealing with memory. Established in 2008, the journal Memory Studies promised to institute “a critical forum for dialogue and debate on the theoretical, empirical and methodological issues central to a collaborative understanding of memory today”. Nevertheless, questions regarding the interdisciplinarity of the field are still asked today. This paper aims to identify and address the current challenges to the process of consolidation of memory research into an institutionalized academic field. It tries to identify flows among different disciplines through a bibliometric analysis of academic articles on social memory, published in the last five years. This paper thus examines the structure of interdisciplinary citations, being guided by questions such as: can we observe an integration of knowledge and methods originating from disparate disciplines? Is the field of memory studies characterized by interdiciplinarity or multidisciplinarity? To what extent are different disciplines engaged in a dialogue that may foster new paradigms in memory studies?