On Wednesday, 9 October, from 12:30 to 13:30, visiting researcher Dr Justine Lloyd will present her current work in a (bring your own) lunch seminar titled:
‘Sites of Conscience’: place-based memory, migration and storytelling as a potential for negotiating frameworks of inclusion.
Dr Lloyd is visiting us from the Sociology department at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is a cultural sociologist, and her research focuses on the relationship between spatial and social change, particularly investigated through cultural histories of media and urban space. She has also published in the areas of transnationalism and border theory.
Abstract
Marginalisation occurs in specific places, for example, in the ways that cities and their institutions have historically provided enduring and under-acknowledged anchors for structural racism. Well after governments and history books would deem these injustices to be past events, traces of these injustices remain in the landscape and specific elements of the physical environment of place and in the spatial memories that survivors have of these sites. There is much at stake therefore for communities, especially racialized communities, in gaining access to and having their experiences and memories acknowledged in place.
A ‘Site of conscience’ (SoC, or SoCs for plural) is a term that refers to both to members of an international network of historic sites and a particular set of place-based memory practices, specifically those that are directed towards engaging the public in ongoing injustices of place. This kind of awareness-raising aims ultimately to engage the public in repairing those injustices by advancing understanding and reflection on associated contemporary issues, including the templates of historical racism acting in the present. SoCs are therefore part of a wider movement which “embrace of the idea of ‘memory’ or ‘memoria’ as democratic, activist counterweights to ‘heritage’ and ‘patrimonio’” (Ševčenko 2023, 16).
In this talk, I introduce SoCs and their performances of what I term, drawing on Hoskins (2011a; 2011b; 2016), ‘connective memory’. Unlike collective memory, which assumes that the experiences of individuals, especially migrants as marginalised subjects, metonymically ‘stand in for’ and hold wider patterns of memory in place for the experiences of an entire group of people, connective memory starts from individual experience to interpret social patterns and forces through dialogic meaning-making processes that metaphorically invoke other times and places (McGrath & Rademaker 2023, 12-13).
Through discussion of a podcast series (Radio Skid Row 2020) made during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Addison Road Community Organisation, a Sydney-based SoC (ICoSoC n.d.; Castrique 2017, 2019), I explain how these pluralist storytelling practices may challenge conventional approaches to understanding national narratives of cohesion and integration. Such connective storytelling thus advances understandings of the role of place in repairing injustice associated with historical racism and reshaping more just futures.
References
Addison Road Community Organisation (ARCO) & Radio Skid Row (RSR). (2021). Many Little Voices: Celebrating the role of multicultural childcare in the Inner West. https://addiroad.org.au/many-little-voices/
Castrique, S. (2019). On the margins of the good swamp. Griffith Review Online. https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/on-the-margins-of-the-good-swamp/
Castrique, S. (2017). One small world: the history of the Addison Road Community Centre. Castrique.
Hoskins, A. (2011). 7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture. Memory Studies, 4(3), 269-280.
Hoskins, A. (2011). Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn. Parallax,, 17(4), 19-31.
Hoskins, A. (2016). Memory ecologies. Memory Studies, 9(3), 348-357.
International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICoSoC). (n.d.). Addison Road Community Centre – Living Museum – Australia. In. https://www.sitesofconscience.org/membership/addison-road-community-centre-australia/
McGrath, A., & Rademaker, L. (2023). The Languages and Temporalities of “Everywhen” in Deep History. In A. McGrath, L. Rademaker, & J. Troy (Eds.), Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History (pp. 1-36). UNSW Press.
Radio Skid Row & Inner West Multicultural Network. (2020). COVID-19 Racism In Postponed not Silenced https://open.spotify.com/episode/4lKRFQUV5LTuJJjfFzYbOu?si=d3364668a2734c6d
Ševčenko, L. (2023). Public history for a post-truth era: fighting denial through memory movements. Routledge, Taylor and Francis.
