Narrative

My research broadly explores the interrelationships between place-making, personal and social memory, and cultural politics in contemporary cities. People create meaning about their lives and worlds through the places they inhabit, visit and make. As fluid mosaics of memory, metaphor, matter and experience, places create and mediate social spaces and temporalities. Individuals and social groups, for example, come to know historic sites, memorial museums, urban renewal plans, or public art projects as belonging to a certain time, as representing particular pasts, as embodying local identities or as mapping particular attachments. Places that are haunted by past structures of meaning may also evoke, confront, or encrypt transgenerational phantoms. I am interested in understanding how and why places come to be understood and experienced as thresholds of time-space in different societies, including how places constitute geographies of belonging through and beyond urban and national space.