War Memorial Research Articles

Clinical practice guidelines: Their utility, dissemination and monitoring at Colonial War Memorial Hospital: A mixed methods study from Fiji.

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) improve patient care by standardising medical practice. However, little is known about their applicability in low-resource settings. Since 2010, Fiji has introduced guidelines to increase the application of evidence-based practice. We describe the dissemination, utility and monitoring of guideline implementation in Fiji, a low-resource setting in the Pacific. A mixed-methods design included a survey and focus groups. All 178 doctors in five departments at Fiji's largest tertiary hospital were invited to participate. Subsequently, two focus group interviews explored clinicians' perspectives in more detail. Analysis included data description, multi-variable logistic, multinomial regression and manifest content analyses. The response rate was 74%. Most doctors agreed that CPGs were good for patient management (100%), doctors continuing medical education (CME) (96%), patient education (73%), supported by systematic reviews (91%) and consistent with existing norms/values (83%). Ninety-five per cent stated that CPGs increased the quality of care, and 80% stated that CPGs increased physician satisfaction. Approximately two-thirds stated that CPGs decreased medical-legal problems (63%) and malpractice suits (68%). Sixty to 90% of doctors disagreed that CPGs were oversimplified/cookbook medicine (60%), too rigid to apply individually (65%), challenged physician autonomy (60%) or were ambiguous/unclear (86%) or not practical (89%). The preferred method of dissemination was CME, and quick reference guides were best for implementation. No formal CPG monitoring existed in any department. Most physicians found CPGs to be valuable for improving the consistency of care. In low-resource settings, dissemination of guidelines should be paired with CME to improve their uptake. Increased monitoring of guideline use appears necessary.

Public Memory, Architectural Language, and Its Configurational Relationship in the Memorial Museum: A Case Study of the War Memorial of Korea Using Space Syntax and Movement Tracking

Memorial museums serve as a record of the past and provide evidence of the past; moreover, they are a place for remembering the past and healing the present. In particular, their architectural language, such as movement through space, is actively involved in fostering public memory that implies a shared understanding of the past. However, it is hardly explained how public memory is configured in memorial museums, and how it is experienced by the act of moving around within the places. This study, hence, aims to investigate the configurational relationship between public memory and movement through space throughout an in-depth case study using visibility graph analysis as one of space syntax techniques, and movement tracking analysis. By examining the War Memorial of Korea, which is dedicated to commemorate sacrifices during the Korean War in memorial halls and chronologically describes wars in the Korean Peninsula, it was found out that a memorial museum works in a bifurcated way. Its spatial layout leads to a locally focused experience along a strongly structured commemorative sequence. On the contrary, it allows globally dispersed spatial experiences to take place along the integration core, suggesting both specific and wide-ranging themes and contents throughout their various exhibitions. Therefore, the locally focused paths elicit a commemorative experience by adding depth, whereas the globally dispersed paths bring about informal itineraries that start from their integration cores. It concludes that spatial configurations, as a non-verbal language, plays a role in transmitting the public memory.

The Auckland War Memorial Museum Online Cenotaph: community participation, collective memorialisation and social cohesion

Purpose Online/Digital cultural heritage platforms have the potential to serve as empowering sites and tools for democratic participation, and for promoting social cohesion, acting as convergence points for diverse societal groups. They enable the gathering of multiple voices, including those of minorities and groups often marginalised in mainstream cultural heritage documentation. This research paper examines the ways in which these aspirations of cultural heritage platforms as meeting, learning and dialogic spaces for connecting and empowering online communities have been realised. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative design, interviews were conducted with users of New Zealand’s Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Online Cenotaph. Participants shared their experiences with the platform, perceptions of it as a collective social history resource and views on its role as a participatory space for online communities. They also discussed their expectations for its development as an online space for collective memorialisation. Findings Interviews revealed that users value Online Cenotaph for placing personal, publicly contributed memories and narratives alongside primary military sources. Participants expressed feelings of civic responsibility, social awareness and a sense of identity and connection through their use and contribution to this online commemorative space. The shift from a one-way flow of information from the Museum towards embracing public contribution embodying a high-trust approach, was a notable finding. Originality/value This research underscores the evolving role of museums and other GLAM institutions in recognising the importance of inclusivity, diversity and community participation. It provides insights into how digital cultural heritage social platforms can contribute towards these goals and promote social cohesion. This research is also a starting point for further studies on crowdsourcing and social Web activities on digital cultural heritage platforms as sites of community building through public participation and engagement in historical/cultural heritage narratives.

“Disgust” and “Disgrace”: Cultural Evangelicals’ Reaction to Jimmy Carter’s Draft Evader Pardon and Early Memory of the Vietnam War in Texas

Abstract This article examines the reactions of cultural evangelicals in Texas to Jimmy Carter’s pardon of Vietnam War draft evaders. This article seeks to answer two questions: Did cultural evangelicals agree or disagree with Carter’s pardon, and why? This article finds that the vast majority vehemently disagreed with the pardon for a variety of reasons, but one reason loomed above all: These cultural evangelicals thought that the pardon was profoundly disrespectful to veterans of the Vietnam War because, in their minds, it appeared to give draft evaders, whom many cultural evangelicals saw as cowards, moral approval from the White House. To make this argument, this article takes a microhistorical approach and focuses on the cities of Waco and Amarillo, Texas, and uses sources like letters to the editor of local newspapers, news articles, opinion editorials, and, most critically, constituent letters to US members of Congress. Ultimately, this article provides another lens for understanding Carter–evangelicals relations and demonstrates how the understanding of white evangelicalism put forth by Kristin Kobes Du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation can be used in a political and religious microhistory.

Women in the Contemporary Polish Streetscape. Memory Wars

As diversity, equity and inclusion policies gain momentum in the Global North, the strikingly low visibility of women in Polish public space is being addressed not only via bottom-to-top activism but also through initiatives by local governments. This, in turn, results in controversies over the very need for gender equality in urban naming, as well as over the commemoration-worthiness of particular personages. The present paper aims to assess the changes that have taken place in Poland since the beginning of 2018, when an analysis of the 12 biggest cities revealed a persistent under-representation of women as namesakes in street naming. We offer a quantitative analysis and then focus on four selected case studies, each exemplifying one type of situation: open conflict, covert tactics, and two combinations of surface vs core values relationship.

Memorial Law: National and International Aspects

Introduction. This article conducts an interdisciplinary study of memory policy, which includes terminological explication and legal analysis of concepts similar in meaning, assessment of the relevance and need to legalize terms related to memory policy, determination of the effectiveness of official memory policy, prediction of its political and social consequences in the long term and exploring the normative limits of national memorial legislation. The purpose of the study is the conceptualization of memorial law.Materials and methods. The main research method is participant observation of the processes of implementation in Russian society and abroad of the concepts of national, historical and social memory, as well as the construction of norms and regulations for establishing legal relations in the field of conservation of military memorial heritage objects. Methods of express diagnostics of problem situations, legal assessment of incidents, sociological and expert surveys (including questionnaires and testing), and modeling were used.Research results. As a result of the study, the need to develop a special federal law on the protection of the military memorial heritage of the Russian Federation, as well as the development of an international (universal) Charter (Convention) on the protection of military memorial heritage sites formed as a result of the Second World War, was substantiated. Discussion and conclusion. It has been established that there is no single position in the scientific community regarding the need for memorial legislation. This largely depends on the political and ideological preferences of a particular author. At the same time, it was concluded that in legal science the conceptual foundations for the formation of memorial law as a special legal complex for the preservation, transmission and protection of historical memory and memorial (war memorial) heritage have been poorly studied. In addition, both at the level of legal doctrine and according to law enforcement practice, the issue of the status and legal means of preserving military memorial heritage has been practically not studied. In this connection, the authors propose the development of a Union Nation Charter for the Protection of Military Memorial Heritage for the purpose of holistic and comprehensive legal regulation of the area under study.

Travelling Memories: Revisiting the Past in Larry Heinemann’s Black Virgin Mountain

The Vietnam War was a period of immense upheaval and trauma for American troops. In recognition of the urgent need for psychological support and care for veterans, a therapy culture and narratives of healing began to take shape, acknowledging the psychological potential of revisiting sites of trauma. While there are numerous cases of war veterans returning to Vietnam in search of closure, very few studies have delved into the specific ways in which mobility and movement influence the reconstruction of war memories and their impact on veterans’ healing. This paper aims to examine how the physical act of returning to a place of trauma can be a powerful form of remembrance and healing, potentially leading to a greater understanding of the complex and interconnected nature of trauma and memory. Through a close reading of Larry Heinemann’s memoir Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam (2005), this paper seeks to uncover the power and potential of physical movement to manifest and process traumatic memories, and the potential risks involved. Understanding how war memories continue to manifest long after the war has ended is crucial for understanding the healing process and the urgent needs of veterans. It highlights the significance of mobility and movement as active vehicles of remembrance, allowing veterans to navigate the traumas of the past and find closure.

Transnational memories of war and conflict in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This article analyses the ways in which the memory of transnational traumatic events of war and conflict of the past have been represented at Wellington's waterfront and whether the site, with its multitude of memorial plaques, can be read as a lieu de mémoire. The study focuses on three commemorative plaques: the memorial plaque to those New Zealanders who took part in the Spanish Civil War (2011); the commemorative plaque to the Polish children of Pahīatua (2004); and the memorial plaque commemorating the arrival of the United States Marine Corps to New Zealand (1951/2000). It, first, examines the memory entrepreneurs behind the commemoration of the events the plaques depict and analyse whether these agents engaged in bottom-up or top-down mnemonic practices and activities (or a mixture of these). Second, it analyses the significance of these memorials in the collective memory of contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Gendering displacement: Nieh Hualing’s re-membering refugee students during the Second Sino-Japanese War

This article analyzes the representation of Nieh Hualing’s war memory as a refugee student during the Second Sino-Japanese War in her creative writings, especially Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, in intertextual conversation with her autobiography, Three Lives. By centering the intersectional experience of a female refugee student, the analysis enriches war narratives with a combination of diasporic and feminist perspectives on daily life distinguishing itself from male-dominated battlefields. While her war experience as a refugee student constitutes her “first life” in war-torn mainland China among her “three lives” in mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States, Nieh as a writer constantly negotiates with her Chineseness and inquires about her positionality in the world when moving across cultures. While Nieh as a writer embodies a “Chinese cosmopolitanism,” the female protagonist in Mulberry and Peach uses “hypersexuality” to reject patriarchal society and ethnocentric nationalism and go beyond Chinese cosmopolitanism.

Factors associated with initial AstraZeneca vaccine knowledge, attitudes, and uptake among hospital nurses: A cross-sectional study in Ghana's Upper East region.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 171,657 confirmed cases and 1,462 deaths in Ghana, particularly among frontline health-workers involved in pandemic response. Prevention measures in Ghana include AstraZeneca 'Covishield' vaccination of health-workers, but research on factors affecting uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in Ghana were initially limited. Therefore, this study aimed to analyse knowledge, attitudes, and initial uptake of Covishield among nurses in the War Memorial Hospital in Navrongo, Upper East Region. We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 128 district hospital nurses using simple random sampling. We first calculated descriptive statistics and two composite variables summing either participant knowledge or attitude variables, with a threshold over 50% considered 'sufficient' or 'positive' respectively. We then analysed associations between demographic variables and Covishield knowledge, attitudes, or uptake using binomial logistic regression with a 95% confidence interval and p-value of <0.05 considered significant. All participants had heard of Covishield vaccine, with attitudes toward it generally positive (53%), and uptake high (72%). Reasons cited by the 28% unvaccinated included absence during vaccination, having already been infected with COVID-19, lack of trust in vaccine safety/efficacy, or pregnancy/breastfeeding. Education, residence, and family type were the only demographic factors significantly associated with nurses' knowledge about, attitudes towards, or uptake of COVID-19 vaccination. While 'positive' attitude was significantly associated with higher odds of being vaccinated (AOR 4.75; 95%CI 1.59-14.1), 'sufficient' knowledge was not (AOR 1.33; 95%CI 0.53-3.32). This is the first study in Ghana's resource-constrained Upper East region to examine health-worker perceptions of a novel vaccine and showed nurses' knowledge, attitudes, and uptake of COVID-19 vaccination were good overall. Further research is needed to determine how best to address hesitancy and understand findings that attitudes appeared more relevant than knowledge for uptake. Findings are relevant for local health authorities in improving vaccine availability and strengthening emergency risk communication and management of adverse events following immunisation.

Historical Layers of Refugee Reception in Border Areas of Italy: Crossroads of Transit and Temporalities of (Im)mobility

In border areas, time and space are constantly suspended from the usual rules along a liminal pathway transforming status and identity. In order to understand how different regimes of mobility and reception influence the experience of time and the subjective actions of both asylum seekers arriving via the so-called Balkan route and Ukrainian refugees fleeing from the war, the paper puts forward an analysis of the multiple scales of migration and reception policies as historically situated practices. How and to what extent has the increasing role of the humanitarian regime contributed to improving or worsening the lives of asylum seekers in borderland places where the memory of wars, civil conflicts, and experiences of refoulement is very much alive? Building on a multilocal ethnography of the temporalities of migrants’ reception, the paper aims at disentangling the historical layers of hospitality in the northeastern Italian border areas of Trieste and Bolzano and the intersecting forms of (im)mobility at play. By addressing “reception” as an entanglement of spatial and temporal practices carried out by migrants, institutional, and humanitarian actors, we discuss not only how time reduces the existence of asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees to an empty and meaningless human condition by exerting control over the subjective experiences, but also how the migrants’ experience of waiting translates into an active state of being with the creative potential to trigger new forms of sociality, solidarity, and senses of belonging.

Remembrance and ritual in English schools

AbstractThis article explores war remembrance and ritual in English schools. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–2020) investigated remembrance practices in schools in England through questionnaires, interviews and observations. Schools are unique as sites of remembrance because children constitute the majority of participants in rituals. School‐based rituals of remembrance might potentially reproduce dominant discourses of war‐normalisation that conflate military values and nationalism with morally ‘good’ values and an imagined community of the nation. They also provide a contested, ambivalent space in which ambiguities of practice and thinking may encourage the emergence, in small ways, of counter‐narratives about war and its remembrance.

‘We resolve our own sorrows’: screening comfort women in Chinese documentary films

This article adds a critical lens to the vicissitudinous public remembrance of the comfort women in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the oscillating representations of comfort women in Chinese documentary films. First, it probes how the violated bodies of comfort women on the screen constantly challenge and disrupt the entrenched gender norms in the interstices of the PRC’s official paradigms of “national humiliation” and “national greatness.” Then, it examines the distinctive film esthetics and documentary ethics of Chinese director Guo Ke’s documentary films Thirty Two (2014) and Twenty Two (2017), given that the latter harvested record-breaking box office sales and incited heated online discussions of the comfort women issue in China. In particular, this article scrutinizes how Guo’s esthetically appealing, politically non-confrontational, and ethically provocative approach helps constitute survivors’ private, gendered memories and encourages the viewers to contemplate his minimalist narratives. In a broader sense, this article contributes to the discussions of gender, nationalism, war remembrance, and documentary filmmaking in contemporary China.

Léon’s feet: a story of remembering

ABSTRACT This submission is a piece of creative nonfiction that is partly memoir and partly a story about war memories in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Royalist memorials of the civil war in the Vendée during the early Third Republic

Abstract In the 1890s, when statuomanie was at its peak, conservatives in the Vendée erected two statues to commemorate figures from the royalist armies in the civil war in order to contest republican education politics and memory culture. The first, aristocrat Henri de La Rochejaquelein (1772–94), was unveiled in 1895. The second, erected a year later, celebrated the first commander-in-chief of the royalist army, Jacques Cathelineau (1759–93). The contested nature of these commemorations illustrates the distinctive character of the Vendée in the early Third Republic; leading conservative politicians and churchmen did not mediate between grandes and petites patries within a republican frame, but rather rejected the notion of the secular democratic republic in its entirety. The memorials sought to assert a distinctive regional history to local Vendéen audiences, but they did so in the service of a vision of France and its history that contradicted the dominant project of republicanism and thus constituted a unique chapter of the wider debate about memory and history in France during the Third Republic.

Croatian Homeland War Memorial Museums – Exhibiting Urbicides and Concentration Camps

AbstractRecently opened memorial museums and exhibitions in Croatia museumize the “Homeland War” of 1991 to 1995. This article examines the four major institutions, the Museum of the Homeland War in Karlovac as well as three sites in Vukovar: The Memorial Center for the Homeland War, the Memorial Hospital and the Ovčara Memorial Home. This first systematic site analysis compares 1) the overall narratives; 2) how enemy images from World War II are reactivated to demonize “the other”; 3) how women are represented in these war exhibitions; and 4) the topics that are left out. I argue that while there is still no national museum that includes war developments in all of the country, the two big institutions, the Museum in Karlovac and the Center in Vukovar, focus on the “defenders,” as the Croatian fighters are called – while in Karlovac strikingly marginalizing and at the Center completely omitting civilians. War here means (male) soldiers and weapons, while the other two institutions portray individual victims without discussing their biographies. In all sites, Serbs are depicted with reference to World War II: as Chetniks, running “concentration camps” who committed either “urbicide and culturocide” or a “holocaust” against Croats.

ДА МИЉКОВАЦ НЕ КОПНИ (ИНИЦИЈАТИВЕ ИЗ МИЉКОВЦА)

Concerned for the development and survival of their village, the citizens of the village Miljkovac many years ago submitted two initiatives to the City of Niš. The first initiative is to form an educational and scientific center for young people.The other one is to make a monument in the village dedicated to the warriors who died in the battles against the occupiers, and fought for freedom of their village and the whole country. Both initiatives are followed by detailed and thorough explanation. So far neither initiative has been implemented, but the applicants will continue to demands its implementation by the local authorities. Key words: Miljkovac, initiative, educational and scientific center, arrangement of the war memorial.

Women in Freedom Fights: state of research and methodological insights

The topic of the article is women in the Lithuanian guerrilla war. The authors review the development of the topic in Western historiography and the changing theoretical and methodological approaches, and then discuss the case of the Lithuanian guerilla war. Firstly, the image of female partisan war participants (participation in a broad sense, from combatants to assisting the resistance in different ways) is reviewed in a broad time perspective, from the period of partisan struggle to the Second Republic of Lithuania. Secondly, Lithuanian historiography is analyzed. The research reveals that, just like in the Western historiography, in the early period, while the partisan struggle was still ongoing, the first collective images appeared as uncritical, little reflected, idealized, and propagandized. Under the conditions of the Soviet regime, Lithuanian historiography did not develop, so after independence was restored, the same images – now supported by several of the earliest narrative sources (Juozas Lukša’s memoirs, Lionginas Baliukevičius’s diary) – crossed over into historiography, and are still widespread in the popular historical consciousness to this day. Propaganda about the Lithuanian guerilla war of the Soviet period did not offer any specific images of the female participants. In the last decade new multicentric efforts to approach the research of women in the Lithuanian armed resistance (in terms of theory and methodology), as well as in social history in general, are observed. Finally, the authors formulate possible guidelines for further research: to analyze the quantitative and qualitative data collected so far, to present a detailed statistical analysis of women in the partisan war; to study women within the context of social history, combining research on women’s participation in guerrilla warfare with the social development of the society; to study the history of war memory simultaneously with the research of guerilla war; to use the interview method more extensively, since examples in Western research have revealed that conventional written sources do not capture the specific experiences of women.

Moterys laisvės kovose: tyrimų būklė ir metodologinės įžvalgos

The topic of the article is women in the Lithuanian guerrilla war. The authors review the development of the topic in Western historiography and the changing theoretical and methodological approaches, and then discuss the case of the Lithuanian guerilla war. Firstly, the image of female partisan war participants (participation in a broad sense, from combatants to assisting the resistance in different ways) is reviewed in a broad time perspective, from the period of partisan struggle to the Second Republic of Lithuania. Secondly, Lithuanian historiography is analyzed. The research reveals that, just like in the Western historiography, in the early period, while the partisan struggle was still ongoing, the first collective images appeared as uncritical, little reflected, idealized, and propagandized. Under the conditions of the Soviet regime, Lithuanian historiography did not develop, so after independence was restored, the same images – now supported by several of the earliest narrative sources (Juozas Lukša’s memoirs, Lionginas Baliukevičius’s diary) – crossed over into historiography, and are still widespread in the popular historical consciousness to this day. Propaganda about the Lithuanian guerilla war of the Soviet period did not offer any specific images of the female participants. In the last decade new multicentric efforts to approach the research of women in the Lithuanian armed resistance (in terms of theory and methodology), as well as in social history in general, are observed. Finally, the authors formulate possible guidelines for further research: to analyze the quantitative and qualitative data collected so far, to present a detailed statistical analysis of women in the partisan war; to study women within the context of social history, combining research on women’s participation in guerrilla warfare with the social development of the society; to study the history of war memory simultaneously with the research of guerilla war; to use the interview method more extensively, since examples in Western research have revealed that conventional written sources do not capture the specific experiences of women.

Veterans, Families and the Domestic Geopolitics of Remembering War

ABSTRACT This paper makes a key contribution to emerging debates at the intersection of domestic geopolitics and critical military studies by focusing on how veterans and their families experience memory and the commemoration of war. Veterans of the Malvinas War in Santa Fe, Argentina, framed the ‘next generation’ – encompassing their daughters and sons – as central to sustaining memory of the 1982 war and interest in the contemporary geopolitics of the sovereignty dispute. It then presents the sometimes complex experiences and emotions of veterans’ family members in order to highlight the tensions bound up with remembering war, commemorative performances and the everyday geopolitics of the sovereignty dispute. The paper concludes by calling for a domestic geopolitics that engages the voices of veterans and other family members to enable sensitive analyses of the ways memory and the commemoration of war are lived, negotiated, (re)produced, evaded and even resisted through familial spaces and relations.