Place, Memory, and Justice: Critical Perspectives on Sites of Conscience

In disrupting the singularity of official histories and memorials, some scholars, activists, and members of marginalized populations have approached memory as a concept that accommodates a multiplicity of subjugated experiences, knowledges, and narratives of place and event, and thus gives rise to a set of memory practices that serve as useful tools for anti-oppression and social justice activism. For these reasons, this memory work has a clear spatial dimension and focuses on place. One such movement in this vein, referred to as “Sites of Conscience,” forms the focus of this special issue. This editorial introduction to this special issue of Space and Culture takes Sites of Conscience as a prism through which to consider relations between history, memory, politics, temporality, ethics, and justice within a spatial framework. Given the increasing pressures to simplify and “purify” national narratives and to pathologize multiple forms of difference, we urgently need activist scholarship on the salient relations between place, history, memory, memorialization, and social justice.