Karen Elizabeth Till, born in San Diego, California, USA, in 1963. Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Senior Lecturer in Cultural Geography, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Fellow (1 September 2012 – 31 January 2013)
THE AFTERLIVES AND SCALES OF MEMORY-WORK IN BERLIN AND EUROPE
The so-called ‘spatial turn’ has been influential in the social sciences and humanities. In memory studies, recent books and articles examine transnational memory, cosmopolitan memory, global memoryscapes, and memory in a global age. Yet these metaphors, often tied to debates about globalization, are still trapped in territorial spatial imaginaries. Scholars assume that boundaries delimit space and that power works from the global to the local. The geographical concepts of scale and place allow for more nuanced and complex ways of theorizing spatiality and temporality that transcend these limits. The materialities and practices of scale call attention to the problems of the so-called global-local nexus underlying much of globalization theory. Place-based embodied mappings and memory-work similarly demonstrate the limitations of the Cartesian concept of site. Moreover, by paying attention to the complexities of material and psychosocial ecosystems, scholars may begin to understand memory-work as non-linear, place-based and multiply scaled.