Detail about Emotion, Space and Society Lecture.

Emotions, and their intersections in the spaces and places of our everyday lives matter, especially because these emotions very often provide us with reminders of the past. This inaugural lecture will begin, what we hope to be, a long-standing engagement, with discussing how and why emotions matter in memory studies. The journal Emotion, Space and Society provides a forum for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary debate on theoretically informed research on the emotional intersections between people and place. These objectives are broadly conceived and seek to encourage investigations of feelings, encounter and affect in various spatial and social contexts, environments and landscapes.

The Inaugural Emotion, Space and Society lecture provides an opportunity for the journal to highlight the scope of its critical scholarship on emotional geographies and strengthen the importance of theoretical and methodological engagements with emotion as integral and deeply entwinned with memory studies. Our authorship and readership emanates from across the social sciences and humanities illustrating the scope of scholarship on memory-work from differing interdisciplinary perspectives. This scholarship frequently engages in research with the capacity to incite emotion and affect, which is felt by researchers, participants and readers, in different quantities and through which the sensory capacities of memory-work are frequently invoked.

Invited Speaker: Professor Tim Edensor

"Contested Colonial Heritage in Melbourne: Commemorating John Batman"

This presentation contributes to recent debates about memorials and the persistence of outmoded forms that commemorate figures associated with slavery and colonial violence. The focus is on John Batman, often considered to be the founder of Melbourne, and a subject that has been commemorated in numerous forms. I explore the ways in which reified understandings of Batman were consolidated by these memorials and argue that they provided a basis for the rampant settler colonialism that was initiated by his arrival in what became Melbourne. While the power of the Batman myth has endured for many years, I show how it has been challenged by a range of art-inspired memorials that provide oppositional and alternative meanings and forms. I especially focus on the potency of counter-memorials, forms that directly address these older modes of commemoration, and anti-memorials, inventive installations that seek to dissolve singular meanings and continue the work of decentring outmoded commemorative forms and narratives. 

Discussant: Alison Atkinson-Phillips