Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Scott Webster, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

; ,

Description:

This session builds on a suite of formative sessions at the Annual Meeting of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in July 2021 and efforts by Hoelscher and Alderman (2004) and Foote and Azaryahu (2007) to explore a recent spatial turn in the field of memory studies. After all, memory must take place somewhere. This session explores home within the context of this spatial turn. ‘Home’ is an eminently elastic term, bearing a “cluster of meanings” (Porteous and Smith 2001) across multiple spatial scales. As Tuan (1971) observes, “perhaps no single term in another language covers a significative field of comparable scope.” Home may simply refer to the material structure within which one primarily resides. It might also extend to the street outside, the broader neighbourhood or hometown, a city, a region or state, a nation or a homeland (Hayward 1975). Home could be several of these simultaneously, and be felt more or less acutely as we move between contexts. It might have less to do with the specificity of material space and more to do with the social spaces that emerge with other people. Crucially, home is also understood variably across historical and cultural contexts, with differing emphases on material spatial ‘fixedness’ and ‘mobility’. Put simply, home means different things to different people.

Importantly, home might also be elsewhere. It can be elusive and out-of-reach, sometimes permanently. In fact, this elusiveness for colonised, displaced and otherwise marginalised peoples may well be the consequence of the ‘home-making’ activities enabled by the very power structures that oppress them. Home has long been held as an ideological site for metaphysical binaries and boundaries: between humans and nonhumans (as well as ‘nature’) (Ingold 2000; Rapoport 1994; Rolston 2001); the ‘civilised’ (or ‘modern’) and the ‘primitive’ (Rykwert 1972; Schlunke 2016); security and threat (Hayward 1976; Rakoff 1977; Tognoli 1987); private and public; a gendered and everyday space (Felski 2000; Gregson and Lowe 1995). It has affect-laden resonance that centres feelings of comfort (being ‘at-home’), belonging and personally intimate memories (a ‘memory-machine’) (Douglas 1991; Porteous and Smith 2001; Tuan 1971). But attention to these affective and mnemonic dimensions should not come at the compromise of an inattentiveness to how the human home has (and continues) to produce discomfort, displacement and memory erasure. The papers collected here consider home – interpreted across multiple scales – as a site of contestation for social, mnemonic, ecological and climate justice. They present complex interrelations between memory, ‘home-making’ and home destruction across different socio-cultural and ecological contexts. Collectively, they signal that any spatial turn in the study of memory and home should engage with multi-perspectival approaches, epistemologies and interdisciplinary dialogues.

This session is linked to five others, building on a series the organizers participated in at the Memory Studies Association (MSA) in summer 2021. Whereas those sessions aimed to bring geographic perspective to the MSA, here we are working for strong engagement around memory at AAG. While not a formal series, these sessions are thematically linked around the broad idea of bringing together political geography’s relational perspective on territory (Brighenti, 2006; Elden, 2013) and cultural geography’s literature on geographies of memory (Alderman and Inwood, 2013; Foote, 2003): "Territorializing Memory" Part 1 and Part 2, "Memory and Home," "American Memory After 9/11," "Race, Place, Memory, and Community," and a roundtable discussion on the geography of memory.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda