Migration journeys, especially in the context of forced migration, are often associated with exposure to high levels of stress, adversity, and unstable conditions. Displacement from one’s home often significantly affects one’s sense of self-identity and life story, and is accompanied by a rupture from many of those things—materials, spaces, relationships—that provide perspective, insights, and a sense of self-continuity. In addition to objects and spaces, self-identities are also constructed from cognitive processes, which give rise to internal representations and beliefs of where we come from, who we are today, and where we might be going in the future. These representations emerge in part from memories accumulated throughout one’s life.

Memories, however, are not influenced solely by the mind. They are supported and shaped by cultural, contextual, and temporal factors. How, then, does one’s sense of who they are change when access to familiar and deeply personal contexts are no longer accessible? How much does one forget when separated from the places that activate certain memories? How are memories influenced and altered when one begins to bring elements of the past into new spaces and contexts through the course of migration(s)?

While such questions have long been at the heart of some branches of scholarship (e.g., memoirs, art, history), the study of memory in relation to places is itself still very new. Further, how displacement from spaces impacts memory is understood even less. A better understanding of how memory and displacement interact will reveal not only important insights into the blurred lines between what takes place in our minds and beyond our bodies, but also a deeper appreciation of how displacement affects our most intimate ways of understanding who we are.

In this chapter, we will introduce some of this groundbreaking new research, while also suggesting pedagogical models of bridging diverse fields and involving undergraduate students in scholarship on trauma and forced migration. Our work in the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education (CFMDE) has at its core a belief that introducing students to this kind of work only at the graduate school level is detrimental to fostering interest and commitment to this kind of work, which is needed now, more than ever, given the global crisis of displacement.

The history of human memory research among those who study psychological processes, and more recently neural processes, has focused on the de-contextualization of remembering from the world which it inhabits (2019).Footnote 1 That is, while subjectively individuals recognize the great extent to which one’s environment plays a role in shaping how, what, and when people recall the past, efforts to align psychology with basic natural sciences contributed to decades of research in which investigations of memory were significantly devoid of worldly context. Experiment after experiment consisted of individuals, alone, recalling lists of words, strings of numbers, and arrangements of figures. It wasn’t until the study of autobiographical memory that the field explicitly recognized memory as being situated in one’s environment. Autobiographical memories refer to a class of long-term memories, believed to be central to one’s personal life story. These are comprised of both semantic (e.g., general facts and knowledge) and episodic (e.g., visual details, emotions) details. Research into the study of autobiographical memory has illuminated a variety of ways in which the structure and functions of our personal pasts bear on how we come to understand ourselves and others, as well as affecting our emotional well-being. For example, studies have found that difficulty recalling specific autobiographical memories is highly associated with mental health conditions, such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.Footnote 2 Additionally, there is a growing body of work that illustrates the functions of autobiographical memory—that is, individuals do not simply recall events; they do so to aid in making decisions, building and nurturing relationships with others, and maintaining a sense of continuity over time.Footnote 3

Understanding how autobiographical memories are impacted, shaped, and linked to well-being in the context of movement and migration is less understood. Yet, movement seems to have an important effect on how people cognitively structure the past. Numerous studies have found that memories of movement, such as moving to a new house or town when someone is a child, are often the earliest events adults can recall. Moreover, the “reminiscence bump,” a phenomenon that has been replicated in numerous studies, indicates cross-culturally that people are more likely to recall more events from their late childhood and early adolescence, in part because this period involves frequent life transitions, such as moving.Footnote 4 This line of work has also revealed that migration contributes to additional reminiscence bumps outside of late childhood and early adulthood among people who move more than once in their lives.

One reason why mobility, voluntary or forced, increases the salience of these autobiographical memories throughout our lives is because it disrupts self-continuity. Even in the most benign of contexts, movement and mobility disrupts the patterns, habits, and rituals we perform every day. Over time, one’s sense of self becomes deeply intertwined with the enactment and engagement with the familiar. Patterns, when repeated again and again, facilitate a deep fluency and ease with which one navigates public and personal spaces. When a person moves to New York City, they might remember their first taxi ride, but after a few years, riding in a taxi becomes a general category of information with many rides blurring into one another in the absence of surprise or novelty.

For the field of autobiographical memory to truly capture the impact of displacement on cognition, research must begin to encompass the spaces themselves—the spaces in which memories are formed and also lost. The aforementioned shift from “the lab” to “the wild” has been pushed again by scholars and students of cognition to consider how our materials, built environments, and technologies shape our thinking and memory. Rather than considering cognition as something that begins and ends with a neuron, the study of cognition has increasingly recognized the myriad ways that thought is supported and shaped by everything from our smartphones to the placement of dishes in our pantry. Consider the example of someone who has lived in the same apartment for decades. She can easily recall where to find certain pots and linens. Then imagine that same person moves into a new home. For the first few months, she may find herself inhibiting motor responses as she reaches for shelves that are in a different location. Maybe the ease in which she could multitask while preparing dinner suddenly becomes something that deserves all her attention. Her ability to recall information may not have changed from one apartment to the next, but for anyone who has moved domiciles, the transition to a new space immediately reminds us that our cognitive functions are intimately connected to our built environments.

Similar to spaces, people rely on each other to recall memories of their own past. Studies with families, long-term couples, sports teams, and other well-defined groups have shown that under certain conditions, people are able to recall significantly more collectively than they can alone, a phenomenon referred to as transactive memory.Footnote 5 For example, one study asked older adults in long-term relationships to recall personal memories by themselves (the more traditional method of assessing memory abilities in psychology).Footnote 6 The researchers then asked couples to recount shared personal stories together. In many cases, collaborative recall boosted the overall cognitive performance of the couple. In contrast, studies have also documented a decline in well-being and cognitive functioning after the loss of a significant other. While some of this decline may be attributed to a wider decline in health or emotional well-being, it may also be that some memories are no longer accessible because they resided in the relationship between the couple.

We hypothesize that the same is true when it comes to displacement and forced migration. Like relationships, our celebrations, milestones, tragedies, and accomplishments are often linked to the places in which they occur. We also use spaces like memories, in that we might visit certain places because we know they will remind us of certain times and instantly repair our mood; after a hard day, one might visit a particular restaurant because the year before it was the location of a joyous celebration. Not to mention one’s home and the memories that may be evoked by each room, photos and art adorning the walls, specific smells, sounds such as music, creaks in a floor, and idiosyncratic doorknobs and drawers. Events, experiences, and emotions accumulate and become associated with our spaces. Over time, our spaces trigger memories and remind us of those moments. What happens to our autobiographical memories of those important events when those powerful cues are gone? How is our identity shaped when people are displaced from their built environments and the place itself becomes a cognitive representation? To date, we do not know. What we do know, however, is that we have witnessed, and will continue to witness, unprecedented human migration as result of political, social, and environmental crises. When we consider the many costs incurred by forced migration, we must consider the potential loss of autobiographical memories—memories that are active and come alive when we interact with certain spaces.

We also need to learn more about how built environments become abstracted, integrated, and shared over time through memory practices. It is clear that moving looms large in the histories of individuals, and these types of memories are disproportionately transmitted. A study done on intergenerational transmission of family stories found that individuals whose parents had emigrated from a country with violent political upheaval often recalled stories relating to immigration when asked to recount a few of the most important events in one of their parent’s lives.

An ongoing study at our Trauma and Global Mental Health Lab investigates how family background knowledge may impact well-being in young adults, and, specifically, how the psychological impact of this knowledge, the narrative theme, and the gender of the family member and participant may be interconnected. Preliminary findings from our study demonstrate that migration is central to life stories: more than fifty percent of participants mentioned moving homes at least once when asked to describe ten of the most important events in one of their parent’s lives. The sharing of migration stories may be less frequent and complicated when it occurred in the context of displacement. In recent work, people varied widely in their decision to share or not share memories of their lives before and during migration. Parents often struggled with what to say and how much, especially when such stories are interwoven with trauma and loss. Interestingly, we are finding that children are curious about these stories but at times struggle with how to ask about the unknowns of their parents’ pasts. Silences lie between generations and families unsure how to navigate these narrative cognitive divides. We have some preliminary data showing that such silences may negatively impact mental health across generations. Finding ways to share these stories may help to mitigate stress and increase self-esteem. Future work, we hope, will guide how migration stories may be brought into the therapeutic context.

Although human memory research tends to happen in the fields of psychology and brain sciences, answers to such complex questions will require a broader set of frameworks and methodologies to understand the nuances of how cultures, materials, and histories provide contexts and cues for shaping, facilitating, and inhibiting the retrieval of one’s personal past. Growing fields, such as Memory Studies, encourage interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the ways in which individual processes may interact or may be informed by social, collective, structural, technological, and material influences. Despite the rise of academic conferences and journals that seek to promote cross-disciplinary dialogue and research in memory wholly integrating, adopting, and incorporating interdisciplinary methods—especially those that connect the arts and humanities with social and biological sciences—disciplinary silos continue to be barriers to scholarly work.

One path that may help to address some of these long-standing challenges is through pedagogy and curriculum development that emphasizes and even encourages the inclusion of texts, models, and learning experiences spanning multiple approaches to memory. In higher education, the biggest impact may come from developing undergraduate courses and learning experiences. By the time individuals reach the graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty levels, they have already identified a line of research and may not have time to pursue newer or burgeoning fields. Also, academic institutions and structures may not reward (e.g., promote or award tenure) for developing new ideas compared to building on well-charted, established areas of inquiry. However, for these reasons and others, undergraduate courses, especially those in the liberal arts, offer an ideal context for breaking down these silos and developing curricula drawing on readings and methods from across the many fields researching memory. Currently, there are reading groups, organizations, and graduate seminars seeking to address such questions, but they are mainly at the graduate level and above, and far less is known about the development of memory studies courses for undergraduates.

One way to approach building new academic learning and research in this area is through experiential learning experiences in which students can begin to explore an area of memory through multiple lenses. In fact, CFMDE was an ideal context to begin to develop and implement such a course. As discussed in several chapters in this book, CFMDE is a multisite consortium seeking to create new forms of undergraduate learning, research, and knowledge production around issues of migration and forced displacement. Among the many innovative projects, events, and courses that have emerged as part of CFMDE is an experiential course in which students spent four weeks conducting summer research about the mental health and well-being of individuals affected by different forms of displacement. An important aspect of this work considered how memory, in its many forms, contributes to the mental health outcomes and impacts of forced migration on the lives of individuals and communities.

The focus, format, and work of this experiential course have been evolving and changing over the past few years in response to the political and social exigencies and the profound impacts of the pandemic on how learning occurs. In its first year, six undergraduate students and two graduate students from liberal arts institutions spent four weeks in Bern, Switzerland, working on a series of projects in collaboration with the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Bern. In many ways, it was an ideal context for delving into such questions regarding memory and displacement, as students had the opportunity to combine various forms of learning, research, and inquiry. This ranged from reading scholarly work of various disciplines, to observing medical staff and individuals in asylum centers work with individuals seeking asylum. Students also visited and interviewed individuals from international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). During the four weeks, students discussed and learned different methods for collecting and analyzing narrative data from interviews that spanned multiple disciplines. Meetings were also held with public health experts as well as practitioners who provided important cultural and historical context to inform their learning and understanding of complex factors shaping the lives of immigrants and asylum seekers in Switzerland. Although didactic learning played an important role in the course, the most transformative work took place when students divided into small groups and had the opportunity to develop their own research proposals.

The projects clearly illustrated how undergraduate students are poised to draw on bodies of work from multiple perspectives in their research, and it also opened important learning opportunities between undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to formal ways in which the undergraduates learned from the graduate students (e.g., didactic lectures), there was also a considerable amount of informal learning happening, for example, about professional development and applying to graduate schools. As a result, a naturally occurring mentorship model emerged that further strengthened this community and expanded the scope of learning opportunities. At the end of the research project, the undergraduates were invited to present their proposals at the United States Embassy in Bern. Each group delivered a presentation and engaged in high-level discussion about their proposals. Their proposals reflected deep engagement and multiple disciplinary perspectives, and underscored the importance of how memory, in complex ways, is a critical dimension to the conceptualization, development, and implementation of health-based strategies for individuals and communities impacted by displacement.

Like many academic programs that involved travel and experiential learning (especially ones located in Departments of Medicine), the pandemic was an insurmountable obstacle for continuing our direct travel to Bern in 2020 and 2021. However, like so many academic programs, we adapted and found ways to continue learning remotely. The work in recent years has continued to focus specifically on displacement and mental health in general. Most important, the focus on memory became even more central to the work carried out among students.

In 2020, undergraduate and graduate students worked together to develop a mobile app that used people’s memory to help maintain a sense of self-efficacy during a time when students, especially international students, were feeling displaced and cut-off from their academic institutions. The research project was conducted with partners from the University of Zurich, and again, as in the inaugural summer, undergraduates incorporated what they were learning from multiple disciplines and directly contributed to the project while simultaneously working and meeting regularly with graduate students and faculty from other universities. This provided rich opportunities for cross-cultural, cross-institutional, and cross-disciplinary exchange. The development of this app in 2020 is now being written up for publication, and a second study is being carried out between schools in New York City and Zurich.

Working remotely, students worked on a project examining the potential mental health benefits of knowing intergenerational stories and histories within one’s family in the context of Covid-19, especially among individuals with personal or family histories of adversity and displacement. Several important elements of this experience must be noted. First, the study of intergenerational memories and narratives lent itself to incorporating texts, theories, methods, and conceptual frameworks beyond psychology. Although the primary bodies of literature drew from psychology, they were not limited to this field. For example, some of the literature also examined gender, and, as a result, students’ further research on gender and narrative became critical to their study of culture in relation to storytelling and silence. Second, as in previous years, given the experiential nature of this work, there was a noticeable progression over the summer of ownership and autonomy among the students. Initially, learning happened primarily through direct instruction, but by the end of the project the undergraduates were employing new skills and techniques to research, analyze, and interpret data. Finally, and perhaps most important, there was a wonderful mentorship arc bridging all three years. One of the individuals who participated as an undergraduate student in the first year, now a graduate student in Global Mental Health in the UK, became the primary mentor for the undergraduates this past summer. Students have presented their work at international conferences and also continued working together as a team. Our adapted remote research has informed how we have structured and designed our planned return to in-person learning in Bern in 2022.

It goes without saying that memory is a complex construct. It can be defined, studied, and analyzed in numerous ways and at different levels of analysis. Memory lies at the heart of diverse areas of scholarly work, but this work occurs not in ivory towers alone. What memories are, how they are used, and who has access to them reflect not only who we are, but also the key issue of any cultural and historical period. We will, however, continue to limit our ability to support people and communities, especially those who have been displaced, if we continue to treat cognition and memory as either entirely in the head or in culture. While we are certainly not the first to call for an important shift toward more dynamic, interdisciplinary approaches, we believe that this work will be sustained only by academic programs and pedagogy grounded in experiential learning for undergraduates.