Conference «Memory and Belonging: Revisiting Monuments, Museums, and Historic Sites» (Lexington, 10-13 November 2021)

Monuments, museums, and historic sites are in a constant state of flux as their intended meanings and purposes are renegotiated through curatorial practices, artistic interventions, and activist undertakings. Diverse stakeholders preserve or reconfigure the ways people conceive of belonging, or not belonging, in relation to commemorative historical representations. Indeed, individual and collective memories are transformed, produced, and expressed through physical and conceptual negotiations with complex histories at existing sites and monuments. 

Presentations might address: How do sites and spaces embody, perpetuate, complicate, oppose, or shape aspects of individual and collective memory? How do artists and curators preserve or unsettle sites that embody trauma, appalling histories, and unfinished processes of colonization and domination? In what ways do arts practitioners frame, rework, or address visual or material culture to reconfigure collective memory, belonging, and trauma? How do artists and curators engage in a politics of refusal regarding contested monuments and sites? 

This panel invites papers both historical and contemporary in nature from global contexts that explore the myriad ways that artists and curators conceptualize memory and belonging through the recovery, rejection, or renegotiation of commemorative sites. Discussions that engage with intersectional identities, including class, race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality, are especially welcome.

Abstracts due May 4, 2021, at 11:59 pm EDT

Conference and submission details can be found by following this link: https://secacart.org/page/Lexington

Best wishes,

Zoe Weldon-Yochim and Christina Ayson Plank, co-chairsContact Info: 

Zoe Weldon-Yochim, co-chair

Christina Ayson Plank, co-chairContact Email: zweldony@ucsc.edu