"Imagining a Better Future through Place": Geographies of Memory and Heritage

Abstract

While the current surge of geographies of memory and heritage may appear to be a recent phenomenon, foci on questions of and work within memory and heritage follow the field of geography across the twentieth century. Heritage, in particular, while often perceived to be the realm of the anthropologist, archaeologist, or historian, also owes much of its existence today as a field and practice to geography, particularly in the British emergence of heritage studies. Both memory and heritage center around concepts geographers often find core to our discipline: place, landscape, regional and national identity, nation and state building, travel and tourism, urban planning, and development. While certainly important to the broader study of geography, the discipline does not solely bind and hold these concepts. Regardless, neither memory nor heritage studies as fully emerged fields of study in their own right rest upon geography (or any single discipline) and have increasingly transitioned from their interdisciplinary beginnings toward what many hope to see as their transdiciplinary future. Even stepping back and exploring memory and heritage as concepts leads to the inevitable branching of conflicting and pluralized definitions as we wield the terms to discuss processes of shaping, interpreting, communicating, obscuring, and reworking how the past is framed; the intersecting space-time of material culture; or the social consciousness or constructedness of past experiences. Whether studying (or shaping) these concepts as social processes, material discourses, institutionalized structures, or community values, such work spans far beyond the geographer. While we hope to center the role of geographers, particularly in recent veins of memory and heritage research along the lines of absent presence, the more-than-representational, discussions of power, and creativity in practice, it’s necessary to step back and outline the broader intersections. With this flexibility and transdisciplinarity in mind, this article lays out four primary sections of direction: theoretical and methodological framings, the move toward the more-than-representational, critical geographies, and institutionalizations.