Description Reflection 1: Please submit a well-written reflection upon the readings. Please keep in mind, I have read the articles so you do not need to provide an overview of each article. Rather, think about the ideas that have been conveyed and share your thoughts about these ideas. Tell me something that intrigued you from the readings and why it caught your interest, for example. As you read, keep in mind when and where the article was published. Who is the audience? What is the state of the field at the time of the writing? A good reflection integrates the messages and contributions of the readings. Reminder- Do not ask AI for any assistance with this task. Reading for Reflection: - McGeachen+2014 - McGeachen+2018 Reflection 2: Please submit a well-written reflection upon the readings. Please keep in mind, I have read the articles so you do not need to provide an overview of each article. Rather, think about the ideas that have been conveyed and share your thoughts about these ideas. Tell me something that intrigued you from the readings and why it caught your interest, for example. As you read, keep in mind when and where the article was published. Who is the audience? What is the state of the field at the time of the writing? A good reflection integrates the messages and contributions of the readings. Reminder- Do not ask AI for any assistance with this task. Reading for Reflection: - Additional 3 readings attached UNFORMATTED ATTACHMENT PREVIEW Four Generation Pedigree Chart PAT E R N A L G R A N D FAT H E R YO U R FAT H E R PAT E R N A L G R E AT- G R A N D FAT H E R Name William S Hastings Name William Shepherd Hastings Birth Date / Place Birth Date 21 April 1853 Death Date / Place Virginia Birth Place Indiana PAT E R N A L G R E AT- G R A N D M O T H E R Name Julia Wolf Name Harry Clater Hastings Death Date 28 September 1933 Birth Date 11 July 1888 Death Place Seattle, King, Washington Birth Place Carlisle, Sullivan, Indiana Marriage Date 10 October 1885 Death Date 6 December 1966 Marriage Place Sullivan Co., Indiana Death Place Seattle, King, Washington PAT E R N A L G R A N D M O T H E R Marriage Date 27 June 1923 Name Rebecca Luella Lisman Birth Date / Place Birth Date 25 Oct 1863 Death Date / Place North Carolina Birth Place Carlisle, Sullivan, Indiana PAT E R N A L G R E AT- G R A N D M O T H E R Death Date 4 September 1933 Death Place Seattle, King, Washington Marriage Place Seattle, King, Washington YO U Name Lois Jane Hastings Birth Date 3 Mar 1928 Birth Place Seattle, King, Washington Marriage Date 22 November 1969 Marriage Place Seattle, King, Washington Birth Date / Place Death Date / Place Indiana PAT E R N A L G R E AT- G R A N D FAT H E R Name Name Wiilam Perry Lisman Eliza Jane Hart Birth Date / Place Death Date / Place Indiana MATERNAL GREAT- GRANDFATHER M AT E R N A L G R A N D FAT H E R YO U R M O T H E R Name Joseph Pugh Name Samuel Arthur Pugh Birth Date / Place Birth Date 19 August 1868 Death Date / Place Kentucky Birth Place Missouri M AT E R N A L G R E AT- G R A N D M O T H E R Death Date 1 January 1911 Name Amelia Rainwater Name Amelia Matilda (Camille) Pugh Death Place Youngstown, Mahoning, Ohio Birth Date / Place Birth Date 25 July 1897 Marriage Date March 1896 Death Date / Place Kentucky Birth Place California Marriage Place Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California? M A T E R N A L G R E A T - G R A N D F A T H E R Death Date 3 May 1989 M AT E R N A L G R A N D M O T H E R Death Place Seattle, King, Washington Name Bessie Belle Bishop (Farms) Birth Date / Place Birth Date 27 July 1876 Death Date / Place Ohio Birth Place Ohio Death Date 29 Jan 1969 Name Death Place Seattle, King, Washington Birth Date / Place Name William Bishop M AT E R N A L G R E AT- G R A N D M O T H E R Matilda Bowman Death Date / Place Ohio © 2018 National Genealogical Society. For personal use only. Cannot be reproduced for commercial purposes. L. JANE HASTINGS Here is where your story begins BIOGRAPHICAL RESOURCES Locating some initial background information: ? Wikipedia ? Docomomo Wewa PEDIGREE CHART Father's Paternal Grandfather Father's Father Father's Paternal Grandmother Father Father's Maternal Grandfather Father's Mother Father's Maternal Grandmother YOU Mother's Paternal Grandfather Mother's Father Mother's Paternal Grandmother Mother Mother's Maternal Grandfather Mother's Mother Mother's Maternal Grandmother MILESTONES MARCH 3, 1928 Born in Seattle, Washington UW GRADUATION Received a degree in architecture; 8th Washington woman to be licensed. NOVEMBER 22, 1969 Married fellow architect Norman J. Johnston in Seattle, Washington MARCH 25, 2024 Died at the age of 96 after a brief illness 1928 1952 1969 2024 JOHNSTON-HASTINGS HOUSE 3905 NE Belvoir Place, Laurelhurst ARCHITECTURAL RESOURCES Locating some initial background information: ? Native Land – native-land.ca ? Land records – federal and local ? Maps ? City Directories ? Photographs ? Seattle Times overview Progress report Historical geography I: What remains? Progress in Human Geography 2014, Vol. 38(6) 824–837 ª The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309132514546449 phg.sagepub.com Cheryl McGeachan University of Glasgow, UK Abstract This report uses the First World War as a way to open up current debates into issues of bodies, selves, battlefields, memory and death in historical geography and beyond. Sweeping through a range of scales, from the global nature of imperialist practices to the intimate spaces of the psyche, this report highlights the contributions that historical geographers are making to these studies and the creative approaches taken. The aim is to expose the need for historical geography to engage with the darkest corners of human experience, in relation to conflict, so as to learn from the past in present insecure times. Keywords bodies, conflict, death, First World War, historical geography, memorialization, scale A grisly tableau was the first thing to greet them – mangled bodies were strewn around, many of them no more than limbless torsos, like tailor’s dummies, their clothes blown off . . . . A stretcherbearer, lacking as yet any live casualties, was picking up limbs – arms and legs that were sticking out of the rubble. He looked as if he was intending to piece the dead together again at a later date. Did someone do that, Ursula wondered? In the mortuaries – try and match people up, like macabre jigsaws? Some people were beyond re-creation, of course . . . (Atkinson, 2013: 389) felt strongly in the present day, haunting lives and landscapes. During the First World War, almost nine million men were killed in action, six million civilians died in incidents relating to conflict, and nearly 20 million individuals suffered injuries (Kramer, 2008: 251). This overwhelming scale of death, destruction and despair fundamentally changed the way that individuals viewed bodies, selves and landscapes.1 The above description of the gruesome aftermath of bombing in London, taken from Kate Atkinson’s novel Life After Life (2013), forces the reader to consider the difficult question of ‘what remains?’ – a haunting shadow that hangs over all historical geography research. In relation to war, this is often most August 2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, a time when worlds were destroyed and remade, and lives were changed forever by the force of the conflict. Reverberations of this event are still Corresponding author: School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. Email: Cheryl.McGeachan@glasgow.ac.uk Introduction Few years can justly be said to have transformed the Earth: 1914 did. (Ham, 2014: n.p.) McGeachan pertinent to those who have lost their lives in battle and their deathly shadows that sweep across a range of commemorative landscapes. However, it is also present in the bodies and minds that, despite their best efforts, travel through the different spaces of their worlds battered, bruised and sometimes broken by the conflict they have felt and/or encountered. As the world remembers and commemorates the First World War, through a series of high-profile events (see: www.1914.org), the sub-field of historical geography continues various quests of critical reassembly (relating to conflict) which, just as Atkinson’s ‘macabre jigsaws’ suggests, work within the boundaries of what gets left behind and at the limits of historical re-creation. In the first of these three reports outlining current endeavours in historical geography and related fields, I will review published work relating to three intertwining research themes: bodies and battlefields, minds and institutions, and memory and memorialization. Using the centenary of the First World War as a pivot, and in line with a ‘new wave’ of First World War studies adopting a multidisciplinary agenda to address the multitude of experiences and perceptions of the many individuals involved in adjusting to and enduring conflict (see Wilson, 2011), this report demonstrates the ‘kaleidoscopic complexity’ (Saunders and Cornish, 2014: 6) of this area of study with reference to historical geography and beyond. Distance and scale In his ‘memoiristic’ essay discussing 50 years of Canadian historical geography, Wynn (2012) asks for the sub-field, once again, to push back ‘against the idea that historical geography has neither contemporary relevance nor something distinctive to say about a world we have lost’ (p. 21), insisting instead upon the importance of engaging with the past in various ways. Historical geography, Wynn (2012: 21) notes, is 825 ‘neither a thing of the past, nor a field facing life-threatening crisis’, but it is changing and there are fresh issues requiring consideration. Using the work of intellectual historian Mark Phillips (2011), Wynn suggests that developing a more nuanced view of ‘historical distance’ can chart a route-way to a more varied and inclusive historical practice. For Phillips (2011: 14): Scientific time may be measured by abstractions, but history’s movements are neither neutral nor uniform. Though time is often compared to a river . . . it might equally be imagined as a city street, where the traffic changes its rhythms at different times of the day, and where the flow of present purposes rubs up against structures built by earlier generations. In narrative, as in a streetscape, heterogeneity produces a variety not reducible to a single optimum viewpoint – what some have wanted to call a truly historical perspective. Rather, historical distance emerges as a complex balance that has as much to do with the emotional or political uses of the past as with its explanatory functions or its formal design. (quoted in Wynn, 2012: 22) Historical distance, if thought in these terms, is intimately bound to the ways in which people and worlds collide (Phillips, 2011: 22) over time and space, often in the most spectacular of ways, and a range of historical geography work has recently sought to investigate these collisions in relation to war, conflict and their devastating aftermaths. As historical geographers address the force of such collisions in increasingly insecure times (see Philo, 2012a), recent focus has turned, once again, to the importance of scale for drawing out networks of power across particular times and places. In a feature issue of the Journal of Historical Geography, on the historical geographies of moral regulation, Legg and Brown argue ‘that geographies of moral regulation can be both intellectually and empirically extended by work that carefully traces the temporal and spatial scales of moral regulation’ (2013: 134). 826 Using Foucauldian theory, the papers in this issue explore the latent possibilities for exposing the scalar networks of moral regulation (Legg and Brown, 2013: 134). Beckingham’s (2013) paper highlights two such scalar trajectories – the imaginative, or discursive, and the practical – in his exploration of the emergence of child protection work in Victorian Britain, while Mooney (2013) demonstrates the underexamined consequences of shifting geographies of risk in relation to the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis in Edwardian England. In Howell’s (2013) summary, he argues that, rather than giving up on the insights generated by moral regulation, we should ‘recognise that moral regulation does not define and map out specific ‘‘moral terrain’’ so much as it creates – and dynamically recreates – spaces, places and scales as a necessary consequence of its being just such a mode of regulation’ (p. 201; emphasis in original). The importance of scale in human geography is retained in this work and, for Howell (2013: 193), it is the active production of scale in the particular moral projects suggested in the papers that captures how the practice of moral regulation is not simply a concept to consider in the past but one that is with us strongly in the present. As Legg (2009: 237) has noted previously, scale becomes far more than ‘a narrative for describing the world’, but rather a way of looking at how people connect to their place and discipline their bodies in relation to broader scales of belonging (see Beckingham, 2013: 141) over which individuals often have very little control. The centenary of the First World War creates an opportunity to foreground precisely this scalar politics and vulnerability by considering the force of conflict through a variety of scales, also highlighting the role of ‘geography’ in understanding the complexities of experience. This report aims to use the First World War as a way to open up current debates into issues of bodies, selves, battlefields, memory and death in historical geography and beyond. Sweeping through a Progress in Human Geography 38(6) range of scales, from the global nature of imperialist practices to the intimate spaces of the psyche, this report highlights the contributions that geographers are making to these studies and the creative approaches taken. The aim is to expose the need for historical geography to engage with the darkest corners of human experience, in relation to conflict, so as to learn from the past in present insecure times. Bodies and battlefields In their introduction to the edited collection Bodies in Conflict (2014), Saunders and Cornish note that ‘in war, bodies are put at hazard’ (p. 2), while recent work into ‘military landscapes’ (see Woodward, 2014) has sought to explore the material and experiential effects of conflict (e.g. Pearson et al., 2010).2 Fluri (2011: 282) notes that ‘[b]odies represent the most immediate and delicate scale of politics as corporeal sites and markers of gender and national identity’, and attention has been given to a range of bodies involved with the living in, fighting for and producing of such military landscapes. Connections between solider and landscape have been seen as reassembled in the construction and articulation of military identities in specific times and places (see Atherton, 2009; Woodward and Winter, 2007). Wilson (2011) discusses the varied processes by which British soldiers on the Western Front gave meaning to the war-ravaged landscapes that they encountered. Using soldiers’ letters, diaries and recollections, Wilson (2011) shows that, by attributing new names and associations to the areas experienced, a new geographical understanding was formed that became critical to the soldiers’ lives and identities. Flintham (2014) reflects upon the complex connections between military and civilian space. Drawing upon fieldwork on the island of Foulness, Flintham (2010: 82) questions ‘how militarised space is conceived and produced in three dimensions and how it exists in parallel with civilian space’, and in doing so recognizes the agency McGeachan of the civilian body (human and social) in defining the limits of military space and being controlled by it. While focus has been placed on the figures traditionally associated with conflict, such as soldiers and civilians, Forsyth (2013, 2014) has used an historical-cultural lens to investigate the role of camoufleurs in the militarization of particular environments. Through her study of The Desert War and of the work of prominent zoologists Professor Graham Kerr and Dr Hugh Cott, Forsyth shows how camouflage should be interpreted as simultaneously a creative and a violent (indeed ‘offensive’ and not merely ‘defensive’) technology. For Forsyth (2014: 261), ‘the study of desert camouflage reveals how knowledges are enrolled by the military to recreate spaces to become sites of military geographies’ (see also Clayton, 2013) and the space of the desert therefore becomes transformed from ‘a natural environment to a dangerous and deceptive battlefield’ (2014: 250). Similarly, Gough’s (2010) work seeks to expose the battlefield as a ‘phantasmagoric’ place. By examining the Western Front through the lens of artists such as Stanley Spencer, Gough (2010: 280) suggests that ‘the battlefield was in fact a crowded emptiness, crowded with soldiers hidden in noisome labyrinths and ‘‘occupied’’ forever after by the bones and bodies of the dead’. The battlefield has also become an important focus in discussions surrounding national identity construction. Using the memory scape Reflections at Bukit Chandu in Singapore, Muzaini and Yeoh (2005) highlight the contentious nature of such sites as they are appropriated and ‘read’ by those ‘outside’ and ‘within’ the state. Such landscapes, the authors argue, ‘not only commemorate war sites but are themselves ‘‘fraught battlefields’’ of collective memory’ (Muzaini and Yeoh, 2005: 360). Yet what can often be forgotten in the consumption of such landscapes is that in these sites and spaces bodies have experienced intense pain 827 and injury; they have been bleeding, bruised, fractured, and broken. For Scarry (1985), this human pain is central to war and yet its affects are incredibly difficult to communicate and comprehend, and for those working on the battlefield of the past it becomes an increasingly difficult element to trace. In order to explore the often ‘unspeakable geographies’ of the body (see Davis and Dwyer, 2007: 259), some geographers have moved towards more interpretive approaches to research, such as engaging with literary texts (e.g. Pile, 2011).3 Noxolo (2014) highlights how literature can be not only an expression of experience but offer meanings for that experience (p. 296). In relation to postcolonial fiction, particularly the African novel, Noxolo, using Eze (2008), notes that ‘literary texts ‘‘extend the problem of truth in history from questions about recovered facts of the past to the issue of tradition as in itself a form of historical experience’’’ (quoted in Noxolo, 2014: 296). A range of bodies (and body parts) returned from the battlefields of the First World War, and human geography has begun to focus more explicitly on engaging with one particular type: the corpse. Young and Light (2013) argue that the corpse is a neglected form of ‘the body’ in geographical inquiry, forming an important link between the living and the dead. In their exploration of the mobilities of the corpse of Dr Petru Groza between 1958 and 1990, Young and Light (2013) highlight the various forms of agency displayed by the corpse and the ‘dead body politics’ involved in its treatment. For the authors, ‘corpses play a significant role in broader processes as parts of complex assemblages of memories, representations, embodied performances and the material culture of death’ (Young and Light, 2013: 144), which have the potential to reveal a set of underexplored geographies of war and conflict. Yet for some individuals, their corpses were unable to be returned from the battlefield or the civilian rubble due to the horrifying force of modern industrialized warfare, and geographers must 828 also extend their scope to consider the fragments or absence of human bodies (see Moshenska, 2014) and their significant geographies. Minds and institutions For the many living individuals who do return from battlefields of war, their sense of belonging is often intimately bound to a range of institutional spaces and their particular practices. Historical geographers have long paid attention to these institutions, from those created to repair the bodies of the wounded to those specifically existing to treat the mind (e.g. Ogborn and Philo, 1994). For example, Hyson and Lester (2012) investigate Indian military hospitals, specifically the Royal Pavilion complex in Brighton, during the early years of the First World War, asking how the awareness of connections and movements within the networks linking hospitals, their staff and patients to India affected British imperial actions and representation. Recent attention has also turned to the specific micro-spaces of the larger institutions designed to treat those encountering the differing wounds of war. Carden-Coyne (2014) examines soldiers’ agency within the unique system of military medicine during the First World War through their diary entries recounting physical pain, and highlights the networks of exchange that occur between individuals, spaces and institutions (see also Moss and Prince, 2014). McGeachan (2013), in her geographical biography of the Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, traces the distinctive space of the insulin coma ward at the Royal Victoria Military Hospital in Netley during the 1950s. In the darkened wards of this military hospital, bodies and minds were subjected to experimental treatments designed to ‘cure’ ‘diseases’ of the mind in carefully demarcated hospital spaces. By opening up these experimental spaces for further examination, McGeachan (2013) argues that new insights into the interpersonal relations Progress in Human Geography 38(6) between patients, psychiatrists and the hospital can be illuminated. These psychotherapeutic relationships are taken further by Callard (2014), in her work on the historical and geographical specificity of psychoanalytic consulting rooms. In this piece, Callard suggests a turn towards examining a historical geography of the psychoanalytic setting, asking ‘[w]hat would it take to fill out the historical geography of the psychoanalytic consulting room?’ (2014: 78). Centring on the multiple dualisms between mind/body interactions, these studies spy, through an historical lens, a variety of scalar spaces, from the grandest of institutional locations through the most mundane of consulting sites to the most intimate inner spaces of fear and despair. Philo (2014), in a theme issue of Social & Cultural Geography addressing ‘insecure bodies/ selves’, discusses the ‘alternative spatialities of being-in-the-world for someone experiencing extreme body/self fragmentation’ (p. 285; see also McGeachan, 2014).4 For many who experience war – first-hand or otherwise – the inescapability (and sometimes the uncontrollability) of their traumatic recollections forces alternative ways of navigating and occupying the spaces and places of their inhabited worlds. A figure often used to highlight these shifting terrains is the shell-shocked soldier. Cases of shell-shock first began to appear in late-1914 in the troops of the British Expeditionary Force during the retreat from Mons (Howorth, 2000: 225) and changed how mental illness, particularly in relation to psychological medicine, was not only treated therapeutically but also institutionally. For many encountering the shell-shocked soldier, they recall the ‘veritable hell’ (Smith and Pear, 1918: 13) of their worlds and the painful structure of their nightmares: ‘it was absolutely terrifying when he woke up, screaming and screaming and screaming’ (quoted in Howorth, 2000: 225).5 Bonikowski (2013: 14) discusses the ‘trace’ of war that attempts to somehow capture an experience that repeatedly marks the body and mind. McGeachan Soldiers experiencing shell-shock were often viewed as inhabiting a space between the living and the dead, with photographs appearing from the battlefields showing the twisted limbs and blank faces of men scarred by conflict experiences, suggesting ‘a haunting excess written on the surface of the body but pointing to a deeper, invisible disturbance’ (Bonikowski, 2013: 2). Shell-shock is often defined as a traumatic event that inscribes itself and becomes stored in the body, returning through the mechanisms of flashbacks, repetition compulsions and psychosomatic illnesses (Kaes, 2009: 4; see also Howorth, 2000), and recent geographical work has focused on trauma of varying kinds (see Tamas, 2011, 2014; Pain, 2014).6 Traumatic experience, notes Bondi (2013: 13), has an ‘intrinsically unchangeable quality to it and feels forever in the present . . . locking the sufferer into a world of unchangeable repetition, trauma estranges and isolates the traumatized, rendering them unable to fully inhabit the world of ordinary human connections’. Through investigations into Freud’s early work on trauma, specifically through a patient called Emma, Blum and Secor (2014) identify and illuminate the centrality of spatiality in understanding trauma. For Blum and Secor (2014: 105), trauma is topological, ‘which is to say that the ‘‘origin’’ of trauma is not a single event localizable in time and space, but rather a topological constellation in which ordinary ideas of space (such as distance or location) are distorted and subject to ongoing transformations’ (see also Pile, 2014). It is therefore this complex erasure of time and distance, between the then and now, in trauma and its aftermaths that historical geographers have sought to investigate in relation to conflict through various guises. In many ways ‘trauma is . . . the history that keeps on happening’ (Gutorow et al., 2010: 4), and work on imperialism and its legacies shows this insight most profoundly. Wood (2014), in his examinations of Jean-Baptiste Debret’s visual poetics of trauma, explores the subjects 829 of time and urban slavery. Wood (2014) argues that Debret was fascinated with what slaves did with themselves when they were forced to do nothing: ‘the horrifying and almost wholly neglected aspect of slave life-waiting’ (p. 41). The life of the urban and domestic slave is often imagined as somewhat easier than the hard physical slog of the sugar plantations and mills, but Wood (2014: 42) argues that, ‘viewed from another angle [,] this existence might be worse, indeed might amount to a living death’ due to their lives being so intimately bound to the temporal and spatial routines of their owners (see also Stewart, 1995). By examining the visual archive of Debret, Wood (2014: 43) exposes the ‘full force of the terror of waiting’ for enslaved individuals. In Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World (2011), Schwarz demonstrates that the afterlives of empire remain strongly felt and experienced long after rule itself has gone. Bailkin (2012) also tracks the afterlives of empire through a collection of everyday stories that attempt to recast the genealogy and geography of welfare. Colonial memories are shown in these works to return as ‘disruptive shocks’, and the ‘spectral reappearances’ of once pertinent figures, places and ideas (Craggs, 2013: 61) demonstrate the continued reverberations of past trauma on the present. Memory and memorialization The elusive nature of memory, as seen in the previous section, can be its alluring quality in historical studies. Yet the intrinsic spatiality of memory has led many geographers to explore its expansive domains (e.g. Meusburger et al., 2011; Jones and Garde-Hansen, 2012). Morin (2013: 5) reminds historical geographers that they must keep issues surrounding ‘the psychic or psychoanalytic costs of remembering and forgetting traumatic events (at individual, familial, and social scales)’ as a key concern in the sub-field; and in relation to war and 830 conflict this caution can be viewed most profoundly in the increasing attention given to memorials and commemorative practices. The enormity of lives lost in the First World War changed the cultural landscape of grieving dramatically, with a diverse range of memorials erected to honour and remember the ‘fallen’. Memorials and other commemorative practices bring together bodies and battlefields in death, as in many ways ‘memorials were markers for absent bodies’ (Scates and Wheatley, 2014: 530) that have often perished on various battlefields. However, questions remain over the afterlives of these presences in a range of landscapes and the multiple ways in which the living continue to confront the dead (see Horne, 2014). Memory is often explored through the social and cultural practices, enactments and activities that demonstrate emotional bonds connecting communities to their landscapes and environments (see Meusburger et al., 2011: 4). In relation to war and conflict in the geographical literature, memory is often connected to repeated commemorative processes and through the (re)creation of different types of monuments. Johnson’s work (see 1999, 2003) broadly examines the role of space in the expression and performance of public memorials, and recently she has sought to examine closely the role of memory, reconciliation and forgetting in a post-conflict society where acts of extreme violence are still temporally close in public consciousness (Johnson, 2012). Using philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s (1999) framework for understanding the ethics of memory, Johnson (2012) focuses upon ‘the actions, or the ‘‘uses and abuses’’ to which memory is put’ (p. 239) to explore the dialectical relationships between memories and acts of remembrance in relation to the 1998 bombing of Omagh. Similarly, McCarthy (2012), in his analysis of the multiple ways whereby Dublin’s 1916 Easter Rising has been (re)interpreted over the last century, tracks how memories (and myths) shape Ireland in the present through an Progress in Human Geography 38(6) intriguing interplay between historiography and commemoration. The difficulties inherent in commemorating violent acts and the death and/or destruction of people and places are well documented in the geographical literature, as shown above, but further attention to the control and restriction of such practices has been recently illuminated (see work relating to the ‘anti-monument’ movement, e.g. Carr, 2003). Work on cemeteries and their subsequent transformations (see Brown, 2013) demonstrates that the resting places of the dead and their relationship with the living is not always an easy one to navigate. Philo (2012b), for example, highlights the ‘troubled proximities’ associated with on-site asylum cemeteries. Through a specific focus on the often neglected asylum cemetery, Philo (2012b) recognizes the unease that can arise ‘between asylums and cemeteries when thrown into proximity’ (p. 93; emphasis in original). Changing perceptions and valuations of the dead due to specific commemoration practices can also be viewed here, since many cemeteries have become lost, forgotten or left to ruin in the contemporary landscape (see Gandy, 2012).The affective power of ruin landscapes (see Ross, 2014) and their ability to serve as ‘emblematic sites at which to re-examine and recast our relationship with the past, and our understandings of temporality’ (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013: 471), have been explored at length by a range of geographers (see Edensor, 2011; Garrett, 2011). In relation to war and conflict, geographers have examined restored sites with grave histories, such as the ruins of an Auschwitz gas chamber (Trigg, 2009), and the ambiguous remains of the Second World War and Cold War military infrastructures (Davis, 2008). Attention to these ruins and their afterlives comprises a challenge to dominant modes of thinking of the past, exploring the abject aspects of human experience so often hidden beneath the hegemonic heritage narratives of such sites and historical events (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013). McGeachan While critical attention has been given to particular sites that commemorate the dead in multiple guises, such as cemeteries, it has also focused inwards on the emotional and affective aspects of such material memorial scapes (Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010). Therefore, turning the attention to the complex fluxual relationships between the living and the remains of the dead, Maddrell (2013: 503) notes that ‘we all experience the absence of the deceased and negotiate living with that absence in different ways, in and through a variety of place-temporalities’. There are multiple functions of memorials, especially in relation to
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