Affect, embodiment and the curation of war: reconciling remembrance and social justice

Monday 25 Oct 2021, 14:00 → 15:30 Europe/London

To mark the start of the new academic year, the Interpretivism in International Relations Working Group and the Emotions in Politics and International Relations Working Group will hold a virtual event on the emotional politics of remembrance. We send warm greetings to all our members and invite all to join this conversation.

War museums and memorials are political. They are theatres for determining who counts as a citizen, and for governing or contesting social attitudes towards past and current military deployments. This talk explores how architectures and landscapes of remembrance shape affective imaginations of wars by orienting visitors’ bodily movements in space. Considering sites of memory from an affect-aware and embodied perspective suggests that it is not sufficient to diversify curatorial teams and boards, as social justice activists rightly demand. The very architecture of sites of memory and the commemorative choreographies that unfold within them also need revisiting. Only then can they meaningfully grapple with the excesses of war and contemporary militarisms.  
 

Speaker

Audrey Reeves (Virginia Tech)
 

Chair

Hannes Hansen-Magnussen (Cardiff University)
 

Discussants

Andrew Ross (Ohio University)

Cami Rowe (Lancaster University)