Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary.This forward-looking book examines emotional geographies as both a subdiscipline and a practice. Written collaboratively, the authors demonstrate the diverse ways in which emotions influence research, knowledge and everyday life, inviting readers ...

This book reframes commemoration through distinctly geographical lenses, locating it within experiential and digital worlds. It interrogates the role of power in representations of memory and shows how experiences of commemoration sit within, alongside and in contrast to its official normative forms. The book charts how memories, places and experiences of commemoration play out and have, or have not, changed in and through a digital world. Key to the book’s exploration is a new epistemolog...

This book bridges theoretical gaps that exist between the meta-concepts of memory, place and identity by positioning its lens on the emplaced practices of commemoration and the remembrance of war and conflict.This book examines how diverse publics relate to their wartime histories through engagements with everyday collective memories, in differing places. Specifically addressing questions of place-making, displacement and identity, contributions shed new light on the processes of c...

Memory studies is a nascent and multidisciplinary research field, drawing from an impressive array of qualitative investigative methods deployed to do memory research. The authors in this collection offer an explicit engagement with the ‘doing’ of memory research. The contributions demonstrate how attention to methodology reveals rich insights about memory and its links to place and identity.

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance proposes that the concept of curating is a complex field of enquiry. By drawing together artists, curators, architects and cultural theorists, it proposes new approaches to curating and ways of developing critical enquiry about this increasingly expanding field. Focusing on pertinent issues in curating contemporary art and performance, the book's four parts examine forms of thinking in contemporary curating; curating and the inte...

Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they...

Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past a...

Over the last decade, the concept of dark tourism has attracted growing academic interest and media attention. Nevertheless, perspectives on and understanding of dark tourism remain varied and theoretically fragile whilst, to date, no single book has attempted to draw together the conceptual themes and debates surrounding dark tourism, to explore it within wider disciplinary contexts and to establish a more informed relationship between the theory and practice of dark tourism. This book me...

Over recent decades, many museums, galleries and historic sites around the world have enjoyed an unprecedented level of large-scale investment in their capital infrastructure, in building refurbishments and new gallery displays. This period has also seen the creation of countless new purpose-built museums and galleries, suggesting a fundamental re-evaluation of the processes of designing and shaping of museums.Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions examines ...

This volume pursues a new line of research in cultural memory studies by understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture. The authors take their cue from the observation that art and popular culture enact memory and generate processes of memory. They do memory, and in this doing of memory new questions about the cultural dimensions of memory arise: How do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in the present? What is their relationship to the arc...

How does a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have?Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg – a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism – to explore these questions and their implications. Using an original in-depth research, using archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fasci...

Historians are increasingly looking beyond the traditional, and turning to visual, oral, aural, and virtual sources to inform their work. The challenges these sources pose require new skills of interpretation and require historians to consider alternative theoretical and practical approaches.In order to help historians successfully move beyond traditional text, Sarah Barber and Corinna Peniston-Bird bring together chapters from historical specialists in the fields of fine art, phot...