American scholar Kerry Whigham studies how societies that have lived through crimes and violence remember and engage with their past, and how this trauma continues toshape the present and influence the future. He conducted fieldwork for his dissertation in Argentina, Germany, Poland, and the United States. Whigham argues that beautiful memorial spaces alone are not enough. If they are visually striking but empty of meaning or engagement, such memorials and sites of memory cannot be considered successful. What can make a memorial truly effective, he says, is its ability to become a hub and a starting point forongoing community interaction.
Whigham also shares the views of one of the most influential scholars of memory spaces, James E. Young, who urged us to abandon the idea of such places as sites of collective memory with a single, fixed, and agreed-upon version of the past.Instead, Young proposed understanding them as spaces that hold a multiplicity of memories, perspectives, and ways of interpreting history. For Whigham, therefore, what matters most is not so much how a site of memory looks, but theongoing process of discussion and reflection about what — and how — a society chooses to remember.
Journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk speaks with Kerry Whigham about spontaneous memorials, how to tell the stories of perpetrators, whether the voices of all victims of massatrocities should be taken into account, what distinguishes good memory spaces from bad ones, and how different countries around the world work with sites of memory.
This publication has been produced with the support of the‘Partnership Fund for a Resilient Ukraine’. The content of this publication is the sole responsibility of Public Interest Journalism Lab and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Fund and/or of its Financing Partners.
