Geographies of reparation: memory and space in the management of difficult pasts 

Organizers: Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, Helene Risor
Chair: Joe Feldman

This panel explores the effects of reparation politics on intersections of memory and space. Reparation, as a political process that often stems from civil society demands and is typically carried out as part of governmental projects of transitional justice and socio-political reform, reconfigures social and environmental landscapes through the fashioning of new places as well as the erasure or reinvention of locations charged with memories of past violence and/or the “futures past” of utopian and revolutionary projects. Places of reparation, ranging from commemorative monuments to rural sites affected by the restoration of property rights, generate new forms of remembering past suffering and histories of social upheaval while animating feelings of hope and justice in ways that are often conflictive and unpredictable. We seek to bring together analyses that consider the spatial dimensions of reparation politics as a key element in the emergence of unstable relations of coexistence across political, racial, gender, and class divides.  We encourage ethnographic reflections on the potential of reparation politics to mold understandings of the past through disputed spatial experiences emerging in daily life and as a result of sudden events of political disruption taking place in and around places of reparation.

Please send an abstract (maximum 250 words) to Piergiorgio Di Giminiani (pdigiminia@uc.cl), CCing Helene Risor (hrisor@uc.cl) and Joe Feldman (joseph.feldman@uc.cl) by Monday, April 2nd.