Space and the Memories of Violence ─ Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception

This volume offers a variety of perspectives on the relation between violence, memory and space. Focusing on enforced disappearances and genocide as violent practices aimed at destroying and erasing the traces of the 'enemy', the authors explore the manifold spatial strategies of domination and violence, and the powers of memory, resistance and transformation. The originality of this book lies in the dialogue it establishes between memory studies and the critical studies of space. The bridging of these academic fields opens up a fertile and, to a large extent, unexplored research area. The volume brings together young academics and prominent international scholars from a variety of disciplinary fields including Geography, Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy, Literature and Cultural Studies, Theatre and Architecture. The contributions engage with the spatial deployment of past and present violence in Argentina, Cambodia, Germany, Greece, Poland, Spain, Turkey and the United States.

Estela Schindel has a PhD in Sociology from the Free University Berlin. Germany. She has taught graduate courses at German and Argentinean universities and published extensively on the relation between art, memory and the urban space. She is currently a researcher at the Center of Excellence Cultural Foundations of Social Integration of the University of Konstanz, Germany, with a project about violence and technology in the EU border regime.

Pamela Colombo has a PhD in Sociology from the University of the Basque Country (UPV), Spain. Her research focuses on the social production of space, and particularly on the constitution of imaginary geographies in contexts of political violence. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-IRIS), France, and a researcher at the ERC project 'Corpses of Mass Violence and Genocide' with a project about the spatiality of mass graves in post-dictatorship Argentina.