2026 Theses Master's

Heirlooming: Rethinking Memory and Relationality through Embodiment and Collapsed Time

Seeley, Hilary

In this thesis, Hilary Seeley presents an intervention into the standard scholarly practice of oral history and an invitation to holistic memory work. Confronting the limitations and losses of the standard life-history approach to oral histories, she introduces a decolonial theory of memory and method for its discovery and understanding. Calling upon folks to tend to various modes of communication; center senses, affect, and the body; and embrace temporal plurality, she asks, “How can we slow and deepen the ways in which we come to know and understand? What is at risk if we fail to do so?” Her theory-method, “heirlooming,” refuses hegemonic constraints on knowledge and advances an ethical, political, embodied, creative practice. To showcase heirlooming, she developed “breathing paintings” as viewfinders to observe and consider what is created but unseen and untranscribed during an encounter. This work includes a multimedia exhibition (www.hilaryseeley.com/heirlooming-exhibition) and this paper.