FALL

2016

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IML501:Final Project

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INTRODUCTION:

The ‘spatial turn’ of the late 20th century has encouraged scholars in the humanities and social sciences to regard space as a dense entity that is actively produced.[1] Spatial dimensions of colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism have invited studies of space as a set of social and power practices. More recently, the rise of digital media and globalization has shifted scholars’ attention towards virtual and technologized spaces[2]. Considerations of the ways in which space informs culture (and its texts), politics, and our reading of history can be summarized in one broad question: how does space function heuristically and what do we learn about ourselves based on our relationship to different spaces and places? In this presentation, I outline different ways in which I have been conceptualizing spaces of memory.

[1] Some of the examples include: Michel Foucault, “Of Other Places,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986); Andres Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley, 1992); Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” Marxism Today (June 1991); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso Press, 1989).

[2] Some of the examples include: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (University of Michigan Press, 1994); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2009); Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Joanne Garde-Hansen, Media and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).