Temporality, Language and Body in Collaborative Remembering: a Videographic Study

Collaborative remembering involves bringing a story shared by a group of people back to the present. In this context, collaborative remembering has been studied following cues such as linguistic prompts that contribute to elicit memory in shared contexts. This study looks into collaborative remembering cues beyond their strictly linguistic character, which from a co-phenomenological standpoint comprises temporality, corporality and meaning making. A two-stage videographic analysis was required to undertake the study: (1) students partaking in meaningful interaction, and a (2) collaborative remembering instance, where two sets of three students met again, ten days after. Qualitative data analysis was undertaken, following Karl Bühler's organon model, simultaneously looking at bodily and temporal aspects, attending particularly to bodily motion coordination. Results show a pre-eminence of the appellative dimension alongside a prevalence of complementary over simultaneous patterns in collaborative remembering. A central aspect in this study is how collaborative remembering - including linguistic expressions- emerges as a coordinative phenomenon, where participants provide a joint account of remembered situations as a single being with a temporality of its own. These traits are discussed following a co-phenomenological approach to intersubjectivity.