Remembrance, Space, Education: Emancipatory and Activist Approaches Through (Geo-)media

Abstract

The right to space is presented, among others, through places of remembrance in public areas, physically as well as online. It is where power relations of society, and processes of social inclusion and exclusion can be deducted from. Depending on social acceptance, and the social exclusion or marginalization, decisions are made on whose story or stories is to be memorized or not. For this reason, spaces and places of memory are not only relevant for the discipline of history and geographical research, but also for the here and now, as they have an imminent contemporary relevance. Besides being deliberate landmarks, monuments, street names or street renaming, as well as memes or even neo-Nazi stickers are products of socio-political controversies and indicators of a symbolic power and a representational inequality. Emancipatory and activist approaches using geomedia (Gryl and Jekel in Cartographica 47:18–28, Gryl and Jekel, .Cartographica 47:18–28, 2012; Elwood and Mitchell in Cartographica 48(4):275–292, Elwood and Mitchell, .Cartographica 48:275–292, 2013; Gordon et al. in Child Geogr 14(5):558–572, Gordon et al., .Child Geogr 14:558–572, 2016) targeting education go beyond the description and analysis of a situation which developed during time. These approaches aim to interfere in society, and they do so using (geo-)media. They use analysis and communication as a tool for the development of the political subject. The aim is an active participation in the development of society, all set in an educational framework. This means trying to change social phenomena by using a suitable spatial, communicative medium. This chapter addresses the question of which didactic approaches could be developed to analyse, to evaluate, to identify, to create or to invent such places of remembrance in secondary education. All theoretical and/or emancipatory approaches to places of remembrance both real and virtual, as well as theory-based lesson plans focusing on an activist, emancipatory education, which fosters processes of inclusion concerning, for example, gender or migration, can be created.