Call for Papers: New Zealand Geographical Society Conference 2010, with the
Institute of Australian Geographers, 5-8 July 2010, Rydges Hotel,
Christchurch, New Zealand, Details at: http://www.nzgs2010.org.nz/
Public places of cultural memory: exploring the material outcomes of
remembering and identity
Session Convenors: Danielle Drozdzewski and Wendy Shaw (University of New
South Wales)
This session seeks to bring together recent scholarship on cultural memory
in public places. Cultural memories are can be personally and collectively
remembered; they are (re)produced and transmitted (in part) to maintain
narratives of identity. Such (re)productions and transmissions may relate
to an individual’s own past, the past of families or friends, or
alternatively to a collectively remembered defining event or story in a
nation’s history. In public spheres, the enactment and performance of
cultural memories is commonly articulated through lieux des memoire (sites
of memory) (Nora, 1992) – monuments, memorials, commemorative rituals and
street names. Azaryahu (2003: 2) has claimed that such places of memory
(re)produce a ‘shared historical consciousness... transpose history into
contemporary sights and insights and conflate the past and the present in
terms of historical memory’.
We invite a broad spectrum of papers that explore how cultural memory takes
form in public places and how these contribute to identity (and nation)
building. Contributions may consider (or similar):
• places of commemoration, e.g. war memorials
• memorialised landscapes, e.g. parks
• sites of trauma, e.g. battlefields, roadside memorials
• everyday places of memory, e.g. commemorative street name and place
names
• examples of collective public remembering
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