Karen Till, Associate Professor
Recent Projects and Works in Progress
The New Berlin
In my research about post-unification Berlin, I explore the politics of national identity through place making and social memory. Individuals and social groups 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 haunted by past structures of meaning may also evoke, confront, or encrypt transgenerational phantoms. I analyze the international public debates, tourism economies, and personal attachments that define controversial places of memory such as: the Topography of Terror International Documentation Center, the Central Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum (which together form a central ‘memory district’), the Bavarian Quarter Holocaust Memorial, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Museum, the Berlin-Schöneweide Memorial Museum commemorating Forced Laborers during National Socialism, the Palast der Republic, the Berlin Wall, the German Historical Museum, Rosa Luxemburg Platz, and alternative art venues.
Publications:
The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) (second printing in 2006).
“Construction Sites and Showcases: Tourism, Maps, and Spatial Practices of the New Berlin,” in Mapping Tourism, Stephen Hanna and Vincent Del Casino, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 51-78.
“Re-Imagining National Identity: ‘Chapters of Life’ at the German Historical Museum in Berlin,” in Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies, Paul Adams, Steven Hoelscher, Karen Till, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001), 273-299.
Public Projects:
International Advisory Board, Berlin, Germany, for “Spuren Suchen” (Searching for Traces), a project by the Berlin Citadel historic center (Zitadelle Spandau) with local high school students and international guests (pending funding, scheduled for 2008).
International Advisory Board, Berlin, Germany; Expert advisory member for new memorial museum center (Gedenkstätte) at Berlin-Schöneweide to commemorate and educate the public about the history of forced labor during the National Socialist regime. Invited by the Berlin Senate for Cultural Affairs and Research, and International Documentation Center Topography of Terror (2005-06).
Invited Speaker, Public Art Competition, Berlin, Germany, for “Die Kunst der Annäherung: Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg” part of opening events for competition: “Rosa Luxemburg. Ein Platz. Ein Zeichen. Ein Wochenende der kulturellen Annäherung.” Invited by the Berlin Senate for Cultural Affairs, and Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany (April, 2003).
In Progress:
Remnant East Berlin: This book builds upon my current research, while developing Edward Casey’s discussion of the “thickness of memory” and Georg Simmel’s approach to understanding the city in terms of material and psychic presences. Simmel characterizes the metropolis (Großstadt) as an exemplary place of social experience that creates new types of citizens. The process of creating “modern lifestyles” can be studied through urban settings and encounters. Yet as Casey and Walter Benjamin remind, all modern cities are densely textured; urban life is also defined from residuals from past lives and unrealized hopes for the future. By following the pathways of the residues of memory from the former East through different space-times of the city, my work complicates official depictions and dominant urban social memories of Berlin, and explores new social spaces, and hence possibilities, for encountering the city. In particular, I examine lingering GDR monuments (the Wall; the Berlin Schloß/Palace of the Republic); political figures (Rosa Luxemburg; Hannah Arendt); and fragments of National Socialist networks (a forced labor camp memorial museum in Berlin-Schöneweide; Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Museum). A book proposal to University of Minnesota Press is in progress; I anticipate delivering a final manuscript in 2009. This book is based upon more than eight years of research.
New Urbanism
New Urbanism (NU) is a social and planning movement that began in the 1980s in the United States and has spread internationally. In my research, I explore how NU architects and planners represent neotraditional towns and urban villages as good places to live by distancing them from “unnatural” suburbs and cities. Through Edenic myths, nostalgic histories, planning practices, environmental claims, and green marketing, NU planners gain legitimacy as “heroic” visionaries fighting against modern planning through their designs for “healthy” and “democratic” communities in an otherwise alienating, chaotic present. I argue that such attempts to return to a simpler time and place – communicated through place-based nostalgic images of an idealized (and exclusionary) “small town” America and green marketing strategies – reinforce existing social and (sub)urban geographies of otherness.
Publications:
“The New Urbanism and Neotraditional Town Planning,” with Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, Urban Geography 23 (3) (2001).
“New Urbanism and Nature: Green Marketing and the Neotraditional Community,” Urban Geography 22 (3) (2001): 220-248; part of special issue on “The New Urbanism”.
“(Re)Placing the New Urbanism Debates: Towards an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda,” with Karen Falconer Al-Hindi, Urban Geography 23 (3) (2001): 189-201.
“Neotraditional towns and urban villages: The cultural production of a geography of ‘otherness’,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 (1993): 709-732.
Future Research: Projects that explore the circulation of urban forms and social ideas internationally through comparative research about both planned communities and neotraditional social movements in the U.S., U.K., and Germany.
Wounded Cities: Witness, trace, silence
This project explores cities marked by the imprint of violence and death in an international comparative framework. My work draws heavily upon modern artist and theorist Josef Beuys, and his project, Zeige Deine Wunde (Show Your Wounds), philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Cathy Caruth, and performance theorist Diana Taylor, to explore how residents and visitors (re)make and experience places as metaphysical subjects – as witnesses to and traces of difficult pasts. I draw upon extensive comparative ethnographic research to argue that an intrasubjective understanding of place as witness may allow people to work through loss and begin the difficult work of mourning. Current case studies being examined include Berlin, Cape Town, Minneapolis; I plan to visit and research also Buenos Aires, Hiroshima, and Jerusalem, working in collaboration with research partners. In particular, I focus upon “historic site museums of conscience” that educate a general public about violent national pasts at historic sites. How memory is performed through these places varies considerably, such as through historical exhibitions, memorials, social mappings, art, memory cloths, neighborhood-based story telling, city tours, music and sound archives, and webpages. My comparative ethnography about these museums will examine how aspirations toward ostensibly universal values, like human rights and democratization, are differently imagined through local sites of national trauma. At the same time, I will explore how the nascent transnational linkages between members of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience (based in New York) and the International Coalition of Memorial Museums to Victims of Public Crimes (based in Wewelsburg, Germany) create international spaces through which socially just futures can be imagined that also shape understandings of “humanitarian” agendas.
Publications:
“Excavating Spectral Traces in Post-apartheid Cape Town,” with Julian Jonker; under review; submitted to Memory Studies in June 2007.
“Political Landscapes,” for Companion to Cultural Geography, Edited by Nuala Johnson, Rich Schein, James Duncan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 347-364.
Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies, with Paul Adams and Steven Hoelscher (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
In Progress:
“Heritage Sites/Political Spaces: Rethinking Belonging,” co-edited with Margaret Werry, special issue in progress with Space&Culture (anticipation submission for review Spring, 2008).
Public Products:
Co-Curator, “Architectures of Emptiness: Testigo de las Ruinas/Witness to the Ruins”, with Cecilia Aldarondo (Cultural Studies). International curation of Mapa Teatro Laboratory of Artists’s North American performance premier of Testigo de las Ruinas, Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis. Coordination of pre- and post-performance discussions and symposia with international and local artists, UMN faculty, UMN graduate and undergraduate students, and Minneapolis’ K-12 Spanish immersion schools (April, 2008).
International Advisory Board, Berlin, Germany, for “Spuren Suchen” (Searching for Traces), a project by the Berlin Citadel historic center (Zitadelle Spandau) with local high school students and international guests (pending funding, scheduled for 2008).
Memory Methodology Workshops, Cape Town, South Africa; Conceptual development of three workshops, in collaboration with District Six Museum staff, South African performance and sound artists, and Cape Town community leaders. Activists, practitioners, artists and scholars developed and reflected upon “best memory practices” in communities affected by the traumas of forced removals through sound canvases, conceptual mappings, tactile impressions and visual journeys. Workshops led to new local networks and intergenerational projects. Funded by the British Academy and the District Six Museum (2005-06).
“Performing the Archive, Placing the Past” symposium, with Cecilia Aldarondo and Margaret Werry. International symposium and coordination of visits by artists Iris Häussler and Walid Raad with Twin cities art communities and the UMN. Funding from the Walker Art Center, the UMN: Institute for Advanced Study, Center for German and European Studies, and Department of Art (October, 2007).
“Cities in Conflict: Exploring Israeli-Palestinian Partnerships” symposium, with Sonja Kuftinec. International documentary film screening and symposium with Israeli-based film director Ronit Avni of Just Visions, and Dr. Wendy Pullan, University of Cambridge’s Conflict in Cities Research Group, in coordination with Twin Cities human rights, Jewish and Arab communities, and Saint Cloud State University. Funding through UMN Institute for Global Studies and Human Rights Center (September, 2007).
“Heritage Sites/Political Spaces: Rethinking the nation” symposium, with Margaret Werry. International coordination of visits by artists, curators and scholars, including Talya Chalef (Australia), Huhana Smith (New Zealand), Ciraj Rassool (South Africa), and Mona Smith (American Dakota), with UMN graduate seminars and faculty. Funding through competitive grants from the Institute for Global Studies (April 2007).
In Progress:
Co-Curator, “Spectral Traces” international exhibition and performance series, with Christine Bauemmler, planned for 2009. Tentative venue: The Soap Factory, Minneapolis.
Future Research: In addition to additional international symposia and workshops and exhibitions, I anticipate a series of publications, ultimately culminating in a book.
City Chronicle: Art, Place, Mappings
Drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s personal city mappings and excavations in Berlin Chronicle, site-specific and conceptual art exploring journeys, and geographical discussions within critical cartographies, I consider different practices of chronicling, mapping, excavating, and moving through the city. Following Benjamin, I explore how spatial and multi-sensual ways of knowing the city might encourage residents to “awaken” to the pasts and presents in their everyday lives. A series of case-studies – ethnographically researched and collaboratively created through interdisciplinary events and artistic practice – will allow for different forms of representing the city through theory, practice-based research, and socially engaged public art. City residents are invited to travel to places, move through spacetimes, and wander along routes as a means of chronicling their city and (re)discovering their selves.
Publications:
“Artistic and Activist Memory-Work: Approaching Place-Based Practice,” Memory Studies 1 (1) (2008): 95-109.
“Place in Context: Rethinking Humanist Geographies,” in Textures of Place, P. Adams, S. Hoelscher, K. Till, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xiii-xxxiii.
In Progress:
“(Re)Mapping the City: Stih+Schnock’s Spatial Practice,” catalogue essay to accompany City as Text, installation in Jewish Museum, Munich, and city map (2007), by Berlin conceptual artists Stih+Schnock (catalogue forthcoming, 2008).
“Painting Postmemory,” catalogue essay for TENSE, exhibition of Judith Tucker’s paintings, Drumcroon Arts Centre, Manchester (forthcoming, 2008).
“Memorial Cartographies,” with Julian Jonker, in Building Sites: Memory Culture and the Contemporary City, Ed. Andrew Webber and Ute Staiger (book proposal under review with Routledge).
Public Products:
Guest ‘Tour Guide’ and Speaker in Casket Arts, historic coffin factory, for Skewed Visions site-specific theater group, “In-Focus” post-show discussion series on “Space and Performance,” for Strange Love device/performance, Minneapolis (October, 2007).
Kennington ArtsLav Advisory Board, London, U.K.; Research, grant writing, and development of community creative space in former underground public toilet. (2004-05).
Invited Speaker, Public Art Competition, Berlin, Germany, for “Die Kunst der Annäherung: Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg” part of opening events for competition: “Rosa Luxemburg. Ein Platz. Ein Zeichen. Ein Wochenende der kulturellen Annäherung.” Invited by the Berlin Senate for Cultural Affairs, and Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany (April, 2003).
“Modernity’s Decay: Cinematic Debris and Industrial Ruins,” with Jani Scandura. International coordination of visits for performances, symposia and graduate seminars by: film artist Bill Morrison, post-minimalist composer Michael Gorden, architect-scholar Alan Organschi, geographer Tim Edensor, European Studies scholar Thomas Lahusen, and film scholar Patti Zimmerman. Funding through the Walker Art Center, Minnesota Film Arts and UMN Institute for Global Studies, School of Music, School of Architecture, Center for German and European Studies, and the Department of Geography (March-April, 2004).
Future Research: In addition to symposia, workshops, and international exchanges, I anticipate collaborating on exhibitions, installations, performances, and other city chronicles with members of Land2 and Space&Place; Ph.D. projects may develop from these exchanges. Publications may include an edited volume, exhibition catalogues, and a book.
Public Memory
In the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, current debates about the location of types of memory (cognitive, social, event, habitual, sense) reinforce philosophical divisions between mind and body, and prioritize time over space. Moreover, the spatiality of memory is often assumed to work as a passive surface upon which memory is imprinted (following Aristotle), whereby places are considered backdrops upon which the dramas of life stories and History are enacted. My geographical approach to memory, in contrast, highlights the role of place and place making as dynamic socio-temporal processes and practices. 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. 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. Through my comparative approach, moreover, I hope to contribute to international discussions about moral and practical dimensions of what Germans call “memory work” (Erinnerungsarbeit).
Publications:
“Memory Studies,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 325-341.
“Post-Totalitarian Identity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia,” with Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, Social and Cultural Geography 5(3) (2004): 357-380; part of special issue on “Memory”.
“Emplacing Memory through the City: The New Berlin,” German Historical Institute Bulletin 35 (Fall) (2004): 73-83.
“Places of Memory,” in A Companion for Political Geography, John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, Gearoid O Tuathail, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 289-301.
“Verortung des Museums: Ein geo-ethnographischer Ansatz zum Verständnis der sozialen Erinnerung” (Placing Museums: A geo-ethnographic approach to social memory) in Geschichtskultur in der zweiten Moderne: Vom Präsentieren des Vergangenen (Historical Culture in the Second Modern Age), Rosmarie Beier, ed. (Berlin: Campus, 2000), 183-206.
Public Products:
Space&Place and Land2 Summer Studio: Memory Matters, with Cecilia Aldarondo. Conceptual development of workshops, Minneapolis gallery visits, and works in progress with local, UMN, and international artists and scholars. Studio resulted in new international research and creative projects. Funded by University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts, Institute for Global Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, University of West England-Bristol PLACE Centre, and Minneapolis Galleries (July, 2007).
Memory Methodology Workshops, Cape Town, South Africa; Conceptual development of three workshops, in collaboration with District Six Museum staff, South African performance and sound artists, and Cape Town community leaders. Activists, practitioners, artists and scholars developed and reflected upon “best memory practices” in communities affected by the traumas of forced removals through sound canvases, conceptual mappings, tactile impressions and visual journeys. Workshops led to new local networks and intergenerational projects. Funded by the British Academy and the District Six Museum (2005-06).
“Contemporary Germany & the Transatlantic Politics of Memory” research collaborative with Rudy Koshar (History), Rick McCormick (German), and Gerhard Richter (German). Funded by: UMN and UW-Madison’s Center for German and European Studies and the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutsche Akademischer Austausch Dienst) (1998-2000).
Qualitative Research Methods
Through my interdisciplinary research about cities, social and personal memory, place making and identity politics, I have developed a “geo-ethnographic” approach that draws upon feminist and ethnographic research methods as well as the insights of critical humanist geography. I pay explicit attention to how individuals and social groups create meaningful worlds in the present by trying to understand the reasons why people make places in the forms, shapes, and locations they do, and how, in turn, these places become understood as metaphysical subjects that connect past, present and future lives. For the past six years, I have contributed as co-chair, board member, and active participant of the newly established Qualitative Research Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, and have created annual sessions on “Doing Ethnography” and “Author Meets Critics” (which has resulted in a special review forum; see-below). I also was instrumental in establishing a Qualitative Methods Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London and am currently working with colleagues in three disciplines to establish one at University o f Minnesota.
Publications:
Entry of “Ethnography,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Elsevier, forthcoming).
Review Forum: “Exploring Transnational Feminist Practice: Heather Merrill’s An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race,” with Karen Morin, Gender, Place, and Culture 14 (6) (pages forthcoming, December 2007).
“Returning home and to the field,” Geographical Review 91 (1-2) (2001): 46-56; part of special issue on “Doing Fieldwork”.
“Fragments, Ruins, Artifacts, Torsos,” Historical Geography 29 (2001): 70-73; part of special issue on “Practicing Historical Geography.”
“Verortung des Museums: Ein geo-ethnographischer Ansatz zum Verständnis der sozialen Erinnerung” (Placing Museums: A geo-ethnographic approach to social memory) in Geschichtskultur in der zweiten Moderne: Vom Präsentieren des Vergangenen (Historical Culture in the Second Modern Age), Rosmarie Beier, ed. (Berlin: Campus, 2000), 183-206.
Entries of: “anthropology;” “feminist anthropology;” “authentic, authenticity;” “author, death of;” “gaze;” “landscape;” “text, textual, textuality, intertextuality;” “vision, visual, visuality,” in Glossary of Feminist Terms for Geographers, Joanne Sharp and Linda McDowell, eds. (London: Arnold, 1998).
In Progress:
“Participant Observation,” for Handbook of Qualitative Research in Geography, Edited Mike Crang, Dydia DeLyser, Linda McDowell (London: Sage, forthcoming).
Public Products:
2005, Graduate Instruction Enhancement Grant, “Qualitative Methods Lab,” with Phil Crang, Social and Cultural Geography Research Group Chair, in collaboration with Department of Drama, Royal Holloway, University of London. Recognized by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) as one of the key developments in Geography in the U.K.