Forgotten Directions in Biographical Research – Forgetting As a Catalyst for Social Change?

The documentary Toxic Business illustrates the importance that must be attached to forgetting with regard to social change: On the one hand, it shows the strategies used by multinational corporations to destroy traditional organic agriculture in the Global South and to suppress and repress knowledge about it. On the other hand, small projects are used to illustrate the relevance of recalling often forgotten knowledge both for biodiversity and for shaping people's autonomous futures. This is examined from a biography theory perspective.

Although both remembering and forgetting are of particular relevance in recourse to the past, biographical research has so far focused primarily on the aspect of remembering (Rosenthal, 1995). In contrast, the systematization and relevance of forgetting has been largely neglected (Epp, 2023; Hinrichsen, 2023). In academic studies, forgetting is often discussed exclusively as the 'flip side' of memory or even as a challenge and 'source of error'. Such casualness in dealing with forgetting contrasts with interdisciplinary contributions in social science memory research that explicitly make forgetting their subject (e.g. Assmann, 2016; Dimbath, 2020; Eco, 1987; Esposito, 2008).

Since an in-depth examination of forgetting in biographical research is still lacking, we will therefore focus in the presentation on possible connections for a stronger contouring of biographical research that is sensitive to forgetting. Furthermore, using the introductory illustration and other empirical examples from our own research, we will show how forgetting in its various forms (e.g. erasure, concealment, silence, overwriting, ignoring, neutralization, denial and loss) (Assmann 2016) can open up new perspectives for biographers on social reality and thus participate in the creation of social change.