COMES project : Collective Memories and Social roles
Duration : 24 months
Starting in April 2025
Co-promoters: Jean-François Orianne et Christine Bastin (GIGA)
Post-doc: Nawel Cheriet
Funding ULiège
The present project (PDR) aims to study the collective memories of the Paris attacks in 2015, based on an analysis of testimonies collected on three occasions as part of the 13-November Program (Study 1000). The PDR is part of this prestigious multidisciplinary research program, in which the promoter actively collaborated during the academic year 2022-2023, as part of a study stay in Caen (NIMH laboratory), hosted by Francis Eustache, neuropsychologist and co-leader of the 13-November Program.
This sociological PDR will benefit from contributions from neuropsychology and cognitive psychology for the study of memory (individual and collective), from psychiatry for the study of trauma (in particular, the case of PTSD), from contemporary history for the study of the complex relationships between memory and history, and from computer science and linguistics for the statistical analysis of narratives via textometry and natural language processing softwares.
A general hypothesis structures the PDR: social roles condition the formation of memories (individual and collective) and modulate selection operations (sorting between forgetting and remembering). Two specific hypotheses guide the data analyses. H1. The evolution of memory narratives over time varies according to social roles and crystallizes around specific schemas or scripts. H2. From a longitudinal perspective, these narratives perform different memory functions according to social roles.
This research project offers sociology an exceptional opportunity to dialogue with cognitive neurosciences, and demonstrate the relevance of its contributions to the study of memory.
