Search results

This article examines the borders of memory inherent to a Japanese World Heritage site, and their significance for the 2020 opening of the Industrial Heritage Information Center in Tokyo. The Center was constructed to disseminate information regarding the widely dispersed “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution”, which was recognized as a “serial site” by UNESCO in 2015. As with the original nomination, the opening of this Centre resulted in stringent protests from South Korea, who sought to have UNESCO consider revoking its original listing of these 23 Industrial Sites as collectively constituting the heritage of the world. This Center materializes a “border of memory” between Japan and South Korea that is the outcome of the displacement and re-siting of the heritage associated with Japan's Meiji Industrial Sites.

Research material is derived from nomination documents, site visits, and newspaper reports in order to contextualize and analyse the disputes associated with this particular World Heritage nomination.

The paper points to how the borders of memory present at heritage sites may shift through contestation. Efforts to fix the meaning of heritage find themselves subverted by connections across such borders of memory.

The paper traces the process by which the geographically-dispersed “Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution” have been collectivized through UNESCO's recognition into a single “border of memory” between Japan and Korea, one which the Information Center subsequently succeeded in materializing and reproducing within Japan's national capital.

Cultural heritage and memory are essential mechanisms for the formation of individual and group identity, contributing to a sense of belonging in society. More specifically, built heritage (the buildings, structures and monuments associated with our cultural history) reflect our individual and collective decisions about what is important to preserve and remember into the future, further shaping our identities as citizens of Waterford. Thus, our relationship with heritage is just as much about looking forward into our social imagination for the future of Waterford city as it is about reflecting on our past.

Sites of Conscience are a specific type of built heritage which signify a society's belief that by remembering difficult pasts we can interrogate our current lived realities and create meaningful change in the future (International Coalition for Sites of Consciousness, 2022). Sites of Conscience are akin to what French historian Pierre Nora (1989) referred to as ‘les lieux de mémoire’, or places of memory. These physical spaces can connect past traumas and struggles to our present lives. As places of memory which ask us to acknowledge the past, Sites of Conscience can prevent the erasure of historical traumas and stand as an act of restorative justice, providing safe spaces for citizens to engage with difficult memories.

One such site of conscience in Waterford is the complex of buildings located at the College Street Campus of the South East Technological University. The site comprises the former convent of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd of Angers (commonly known as the Good Shepherd Sisters); the St Mary's Good Shepherd (Magdalene) Laundry; and St Dominick's Industrial School. The site was occupied in 1884 and the Laundry operated until its closure in 1982 (Department of Justice, 2013). This chapter will consider the former Magdalene Laundry and Industrial School's cultural and heritage significance to Waterford as a site of conscience, which encourages the citizens of Waterford not only to connect our past to our present, but to connect these memories to current actions to create a more just society into the future.

The built heritage of this complex acts as a powerful memory aide of a shared local history, allowing citizens to connect this past to related contemporary human rights issues. In this way, the former Laundry and Industrial School can stimulate discussions on gendered violence today, or to interrogate modern forms of institutionalisation such as Direct Provision. The chapter will further consider how these connections are even more important when our need to remember and recognise past atrocities are met with social, political, economic or cultural pressure to forget. Sometimes the desire for erasure is understandable; we want to commit events to the past and move on. However, such erasure can further disempower survivors of these institutions; prevent current and future generations from learning critical lessons; and dismantle future opportunities for healing and reconciliation. In this context, Sites of Conscience offer an opportunity to connect a difficult past to visions of a more socially just city of the future.

The destruction of armed confrontations – ranging from chronic armed conflicts to full-scale wars – leads to enormous loss of human lives and causes wide-scale devastation. They also leave deep and lasting traumas in the minds of those whose lives are torn apart because of a conflict. Memorialisation of conflict-affected sites plays an invaluable part in post-trauma recovery and can contribute to the reconciliation of different groups involved in a conflict as these sites are representatives of communities' collective memory, identity and a source of unity and resilience. This paper aims to investigate post-trauma recovery and reconciliation processes through the phenomena of memorialisation. It aims to answer how and if the memorialisation of sites of pain can contribute to the recovery and reconciliation of affected communities and serve as examples for other people around the world.

The documentation of such processes and the lessons learnt can offer valuable information for conducting similar exercises in other settings ravaged by a conflict. To achieve this, a review of literature on trauma, memory, memorialisation and difficult heritage was conducted, while the memorialisation processes from different cases such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1939–1945), Beirut (1975–1990) and Sarajevo's Vijecnica and Mostar Bridge (1992–1995) were analysed.

It was identified that the potential of memorialisation for post-trauma recovery and reconciliation is vast. However, if these processes can “heal” or “hurt” depend largely on who the stakeholders are; how the site and events are interpreted and presented; how pre/post-conflict relationships and dynamics are harnessed; how symbolic meanings (old and new) are [re]interpreted; the spatial-temporal nature of the site and those interacting with it; and the intended and perceived messages. Altogether, memorialisation of conflict-affected sites is a political and continuous process that should take into consideration all those directly and indirectly involved, the dynamics between them and all the symbolic meanings acquired and attributed to the site.

The study critically explores frameworks of memorialisation and their impact on both the built environment and communities. It contributes to the wider discussion of difficult heritage memorialisation and approaches to reflect on sites and cities emerging from crises such as conflict.

This paper aims to discuss the constitution of the Memorial of Resistance of São Paulo (MRSP) by adopting the ANTi-History approach, thereby providing greater transparency to the socio-political relations of multiple actors involved in the constitution of this place as a site of memory.

By adopting the principles of ANTi-History, the researchers focused on the socio-politics of different human and nonhuman actors to examine how this site of memory was constituted. The researchers sought to turn the process of constituting the MRSP more transparent, putting together one of the possible historical versions of this phenomenon. The data collected included oral and documental sources (interviews, videos, books, newspapers and websites).

The findings support the notion of history as a socially constructed narrative that emerges through associations of heterogeneous actors in a dynamic and continuous process of (re)configuration. Additionally, by exposing the power relations and negotiations manoeuvres used by multiple actors, it allowed the researchers to highlight the complexity of the Memorial’s history as a black box, contextualizing them in a period of intense social upheaval, re-democratization and transitional justice within Brazilian society.

The paper outlines the process of listing the DEOPS/SP building and the social mobilization movements during the 1980s and 1990s in Brazil, illustrating some of the results obtained from a more extensive research project that dealt with the MRSP’s constitution process. It offers an in-depth example of using the ANTi-History approach in Organizational Studies, allowing the researchers to remove the organization’s veil of apparent simplicity and to bring back to life voices and actors that have been erased, disguised and silenced by the dominant version of events.

This paper analyses children's experiences of school or family visits to Hare Krishna eco-farms in Europe. The article evaluates the extent to which these encounters enable retention and recollection of memories and, consequently, trigger change towards more sustainable behaviour.

Participatory research, qualitative observations and theories of childhood memory are used to explore the nature of children's environmental encounters on Hare Krishna eco-tours.

Findings reveal that Krishna eco-tours offer a conducive environment for cerebral registering and future reminiscing through the following components: experiential learning of sustainable practices which are radically different to mainstream alternatives, sensory experiences, nature play and entertainment and freedom from everyday constraints.

The emerging literature on children's eco-tourism has largely focussed on market-related aspects and farmers' needs. In contrast, the authors’ conceptual framework, based on contemporary research in childhood memories, offers a tool to evaluate the impacts of eco-tourism from a more holistic perspective.

Using oceanographer Rachel Carson's study The Edge of the Sea (1955) to contextualise tidal spaces, this chapter discusses how constantly shifting and eroding coastlines act as a site for writing, re-writing and performing acts of cultural and personal memory. It also considers the ecological impact of human activity on tidal spaces and their more-than-human inhabitants.

14-18 NOW's Pages of the Sea, directed by Danny Boyle, invited communities around the United Kingdom to meet on their local beach to commemorate those who were lost in World War I by marking portraits in the tidal sands. Choreographer Chloë Smith's Tidal, performed in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 2015, was commissioned as a commemorative work but became an act of personal memorialising when Smith's brother drowned prior to the event. Performance company Curious's Out of Water (2012–2014), invites participants on a dawn-walk to the shoreline exploring memory, time, genealogy and water through song and movement. My own collaborative site-responsive work, Tide Times (2018), created with electroacoustic composer Tim Cooper for the tidal island of Cramond, explores the multiple identities of place over time. Tide Times encouraged audiences to create their own tidal poems and artworks through a series of invitations in treasure chests hidden around the island.

In explicating these aforementioned artworks, which explore ideas of remembrance using tidal spaces, this chapter will also acknowledge the forgetting that is implicit in performing these actions. What can the legacy of commemorations traced in such a transient and precarious space as a tidal zone be? This chapter argues that while shorelines provide sites for large and small scale acts of public remembering, they are simultaneously acts of forgetting as the twice daily tides cause inevitable erasure.

Studies of disaster and conflict often mention the Indonesian case of Aceh province because of its twin histories of separatist conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, each with massive losses of life and infrastructural damages. This chapter addresses the tourism angle in Aceh’s tourism–disaster–conflict nexus with a review and analysis of the efforts to memorialise these events through the establishment of museums in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. Museums that preserve dark aspects of the past, such as violent wars, disasters and mass death must navigate the tension between providing a record of what has occurred and engaging with collective memory while not denying the individual experience of the event. The tsunami has been formally commemorated with a monumental, centrally located museum. Meanwhile, a few local non-governmental organisations with a small grant from an international donor struggled to establish a Peace and Human Rights Museum to commemorate the violence and human rights violations of the war in Aceh. Memories of Aceh’s conflict remain largely in the informal sphere. These divergent memorialisations of Aceh’s disasters and conflicts serve as a point of entry for examining how museums and their benefactors engage in contested memory politics.

Ancient city walls are typical linear space elements of Beijing that represent the transformation of urban form over the past 800 years and have greatly influenced the memory of the entire city. However, recently, most of the walls have been torn down in the process of fast urbanization and old city renewal. The purpose of this paper is to focus on people’s cognition and evaluation of urban memory during this pull-down-and-preserve process.

A sample of 380 participants was investigated on a number of issues using questionnaires, including memory case reminders (stability, variability, temporality), emotional bonding with memory case (identity, dependence, authenticity), and socio-demographic variables (age, education, life experience, length of residence). The urban memory cognition model and attitude evaluation value model which were based on Likert scale were used to process the collected data.

In the three aspects of memory case reminders, stability and temporary elements can be most cognized, whereas variability elements are more difficult due to their change over time. As for emotional bonding with memory case, people show a high level of identification with the walls; the walls’ memory being passed down could enhance people’s memory when mentioning Beijing. Further, higher education groups consider the walls’ authenticity to be most important and are unwilling to accept the outcome of walls-ruins parks; older adults have tolerant attitudes to the ruins parks.

This study could not only contribute to the excavation of urban memory, but also strengthen citizens’ sense of identity and cohesiveness, thus shaping the spirit and culture of the city. Some findings could provide applicable guidelines for urban heritage protection and contribute a new perspective on the interrelationship between people and their physical surroundings.

The purpose of this article is to expand the discussion pertaining to Vimy beyond traditional historic and military circles and to illustrate that the site is a significant tourism attraction featuring evolving management and interpretation approaches. This is achieved by describing the commemoration of First World War sites and the evolution and transformation of visitor typologies at these sites. The conversation is framed within a discussion of the role of heritage dissonance in management. Since this article was written at the onset of the centennial of the Great War, an examination of the management of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, which includes a tourism perspective, is timely.

Consisting of participation observations and a review of literature, documentation, government reports and Web sites describing the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, this analysis is complemented by site visits and discussions with key personnel involved in the management of the site.

Because this article precedes the upcoming centennial of the Great War, an examination of the management of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, which includes a tourism perspective, is timely. The discussion and conclusion sections provide a suggestion of how dissonant heritage can be addressed, and present an argument for the inclusion of new technologies in the management and interpretation of First World War memorials and the celebrations associated with the centennial of 2014-2019 in order to embrace new visitor types.

This is a conceptual paper examining past and current management strategies of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial. No participants or manager was interviewed or surveyed.

Strategies to improve future management through the engagement of tourism researchers, new technologies and by addressing dissonant heritage are provided through literature review and on-site visits.

Currently, the management of the Vimy Memorial caters largely to a certain segment of Canadian population. The findings suggest that by addressing other components of Canadian society and even other combatants, the management and interpretation of the site could be greatly diversified and could eventually become a battlefield like Gettysburg or Gallipoli, where all combatants are recognized and honored.

This is the first paper examining the management of the Vimy Memorial from a tourism perspective.