Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University

Bringing together a truly global range of scholars, this volume explores heritage, memory, and identity through a diverse set of subjects, including heritage sites, practices of memorialization, museums, sites of contestation, and human rights.

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

Trauma Informed Placemaking offers an introduction to understanding trauma and healing in place. It offers insights that researchers and practitioners can apply to their place-based practice, learning from a global cohort of place leaders and communities. The book introduces the ethos and application of the trauma-informed approach to working in place, with references to historical and contemporary trauma, including trauma caused by placemakers. It introduces the potential of place and of place practitioners to heal. Offering 20 original frameworks, toolkits and learning exercises across 33 first- and third-person chapters, multi-disciplinary insights are presented throughout. These are organised into four sections that lead the reader to an awareness of how trauma and healing operate in place. The book offers a first gathering of the current praxis in the field – how we can move from trauma in place to healing in place – and concludes with calls to action for the trauma-informed placemaking approach to be adopted. This book will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners interested in people and places, from artists and architects, policy makers and planners, community development workers and organisations, placemakers, to local and national governments. It will appeal to the disciplines of human geography, sociology, politics, cultural studies, psychology and to placemakers, planners and policymakers and those working in community development.

Places of Pain and Shame is a cross-cultural study of sites that represent painful and/or shameful episodes in a national or local community’s history, and the ways that government agencies, heritage professionals and the communities themselves seek to remember, commemorate and conserve these cases – or, conversely, choose to forget them. Such episodes and locations include: massacre and genocide sites, places related to prisoners of war, civil and political prisons, and places of ‘benevolent’ internment such as leper colonies and lunatic asylums. These sites bring shame upon us now for the cruelty and futility of the events that occurred within them and the ideologies they represented. They are however increasingly being regarded as ‘heritage sites’, a far cry from the view of heritage that prevailed a generation ago when we were almost entirely concerned with protecting the great and beautiful creations of the past, reflections of the creative genius of humanity rather than the reverse – the destructive and cruel side of history. Why has this shift occurred, and what implications does it have for professionals practicing in the heritage field? In what ways is this a ‘difficult’ heritage to deal with? This volume brings together academics and practitioners to explore these questions, covering not only some of the practical matters, but also the theoretical and conceptual issues, and uses case studies of historic places, museums and memorials from around the globe, including the United States, Northern Ireland, Poland, South Africa, China, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Timor and Australia.

Across the globe, history has gone public. With the rise of the internet, family historians are now delving into archives continents apart. Activists look into and recreate the past to promote social justice or environmental causes. Dark and difficult pasts are confronted at sites of commemoration. Artists draw on memory and the past to study the human condition and make meaning in the present. As a result of this democratisation of history, public history movements have now risen to prominence. This groundbreaking edited collection takes a comprehensive look at public history throughout the world. Divided into three sections - Background, Definitions and Issues; Approaches and Methods; and Sites of Public History - it contextualises public history in eleven different countries, explores the main research skills and methods of the discipline and illustrates public history research with a variety of global case studies. What is Public History Globally? provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which ordinary people become active participants in historical processes and it will be an invaluable resource for advance undergraduates and postgraduates studying public history, museology and heritage studies.

The definition of “public archaeology” has expanded in recent years to include archaeologists’ collaborations with and within communities and activities in support of education, civic renewal, peacebuilding, and social justice. Barbara Little and Paul Shackel, long-term leaders in the growth of a civically-engaged, relevant archaeology, outline a future trajectory for the field in this concise, thoughtful volume. Drawing from the archaeological study of race and labor, among other examples, the authors explore this crucial opportunity and responsibility, then point the way for the discipline to contribute to the contemporary public good.

In this book, practitioners and students discover perspectives on landscape, place, heritage, memory, emotions and geopolitics intertwined in evolving citizenship and democratization debates. This volume shows how memorialization can contribute to wider inclusive interpretations of history, tourism and human rights promoted by the European Project. It's geographies of memories can foster cooperation as witnessed throughout Europe during the 2014-18 WWI commemorations. Due to new world orders, geopolitical reconfigurations and ideals that emerged after 1918, many countries ranging from the Baltic and Russia to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece, eastern and central Europe to Ireland are continuing with commemorations regarding their specific memories in the wider Europe. Shared memorial spaces can act in post conflict areas as sites of reconciliation; nonetheless `the peace' cannot be taken for granted with insecurities, globalization, and nationalisms in the USA and Russia; the UK's Brexit stress and populist movements in Western Europe, Visegrád and Balkan countries. Citizen-fatigue is reflected in socio-political malaise mirrored in France's Yellow Vest movement and elsewhere. Empathy with other peoples' places of memory can assist citizens learn from the past. Memory sites promoted by the EU, Council of Europe and UNESCO may tend to homogenize local memories; nevertheless, they act as vectors in memorialization, stimulating debate and re-evaluating narratives. This textbook combines geographical, inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary approaches and perspectives on spaces of memory by a range of authors from different countries and traditions offers the reader diverse and holistic perspectives on cultural geography, dynamic geopolitics, globalization and citizenship.

This focus issue of the journal draws attention to “Collections in a Digital Age.” The essays are, like digital public history itself, multi-faceted showing a variety of possibilities, opportunities, challenges, and best-practices at a range of institutions or dealing with an assortment of historical materials. The contributions are drawn from working group activity at the April 2015 annual meeting of the National Council on Public History.