Abstract
-
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.