Place,Memory,and Justice: Critical Perspectives on Sites of Conscience

Sites of Conscience: Putting Memory Into Action

The “Sites of Conscience” program is a global movement often led by those with lived experience, or their communities and allies, to reclaim and reinterpret places of human suffering and injustice as sites of memory. This thereby encourages reflection on how a geographically situated and specific set of past events have broader relevance to contemporary debates about democracy, human rights, and social justice (Ševčenko, 2010, 2011). The sites of conscience movement has its origins in the aftermath of World War II and the postcolonial wake of collapsing empires, dictatorships, and oppressive regimes (Ashton & Wilson, 2014). More recently, in 1999, the movement was formally constituted around a network of museums, memory sites, and cultural institutions called the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICoSoC—“the Coalition”) (International Coalition of Sites of Conscience [ICoSoC], 2020b). Headquartered in New York, the Coalition is now a network of over 300 member sites in 65 countries (see Norris, this issue). With the tagline “History is Now” and a critical framework aimed at turning memory into action, the Coalition forms an important means for pressuring nation-states to acknowledge gaps and absences in historical records and narratives, and to support grassroots initiatives to discuss past human rights violations within ongoing social justice issues (Gabriel, 2011).

The formal Sites of Conscience network (capitalized) mobilized by the Coalition itself sits alongside other site-specific interventions and memory projects that do not have formal recognition. We refer collectively to these formal/official and informal practices as “sites of conscience” (lower case). While sometimes terminology is used interchangeably, such a sites of conscience framework is distinct from top-down forms of memorialization. While sites of conscience engage with memory, they do so in very particular ways, having a prospective rather than retrospective orientation, and are thus focused on present action and transformation.

This focus on material sites, not just as symptoms of wider struggles but as places of memory-making in themselves, speaks to a growing body of literature on the politics of place within public histories as a means to reclaim historical sites of exclusion for the purposes of making claims for justice in the present (Bendiner-Viani, 2019; Hibberd et al., 2019; Hocking, 2015; Nelson & Olin, 2003; Sergel, 2016). For example, Stevens et al. (2018) propose the notion of the “dialogic monument” to describe counter-monuments that contrast “spatial, thematic and experiential relationships to . . . existing commemorative topograph[ies]” (p. 731). Ongoing and long-standing activist memory work, such as the contestations of material LGBTI public memory canvassed by Dunn (2016) in his book Queerly Remembered, disrupts the singularity of official histories and memorials. Thus, some members of marginalized populations, activists, and scholars have approached the materialisations of memory as a contested domain that includes a multiplicity of subjugated experiences, knowledges, narratives of place and event, and understandings of justice.

These tensions around materialization of memory have particular resonance in the settler-colonial context. Official memory, and its materialization through monuments and heritage preservation, is part of the denial and thus legitimation of the ongoing violation, dispossession, and elimination of First Nations people and the settler occupation of their land. However, official memory might be contested through counter-memories of settler-colonial states, particularly those led by First Nations and Indigenous people. In this special issue, Andrew and Hibberd; De Silva; Porter and McComsey; and van Marle all explore the possibility and limitations of sites of conscience frameworks as counter-memorial practices in settler-colonial states. Andrew and Hibberd argue that the Blacktown Native Institution (on Darug Country, Australia) can be understood as a living being with “powerful agency” that can be understood as a “living memorial,” which is a “performative, ritual, and dematerialized practice. . . rooted in community” and cared for by Darug Traditional Custodians rather than dependent on “built structures” (Andrew & Hibberd, this issue). This form of practice is explored through Darug and creative-led activations at the Blacktown Native Institution with Blacktown Arts Centre support and with Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art C3West program. Central to Andrew and Hibberd’s analysis is their challenging of the centrality of “site” to sites of conscience, arguing that this term has colonial connotations of territory: “a tool of dispossession, rebranding, and denial of Indigenous sovereignty.” Instead, they propose the term “zone” to “better define the expansive realms of First Nations’ experience and memory,” and as providing opportunities for healing that are incapable of reduction to spectacles of Aboriginal trauma and victimhood for public consumption.

Writing in the context of Hawai’i (USA), De Silva explores the role of mele and hula as sources of Kanaka counter-memory of and resistance to colonization and thus sites of conscience. Mele and hula are not automatically legible as sites of conscience because they are conventionally consumed through tourism as a form of entertainment (the “most widely-used trope in the cache of touristspeak, the most common marker of Hawai’i and Hawaiian-ness”) and are also distinct to conventional western memorials (“museums, monuments, and other constructed sites” that the general public is trained to “read”). However, De Silva argues that it is their very illegibility and the “moments of dissonance” this generates that give rise to an opportunity for realizing the “decolonizing potential” of sites of conscience: “By causing moments of uncertainty, dissonance prepares the onlooker to comprehend sites of consciousness as such, and not merely as part of the Hawai’i experience” (De Silva, this issue).

Porter and McComsey present the role of sites of conscience in justice and healing for survivors of the Kinchela Boys’ Home (KBH) (on Dunghutti Country, Australia). The KBH was an institution for First Nations boys forcibly removed from their families where they were “stripped of their names, given numbers and subjected to a strict regime of manual labour” and subjected to routine “harsh—physical, psychological, emotional, cultural and sexual abuse” (Porter & McComsey, this issue). The Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Centre (KBHAC) operates a mobile education center in a former school bus. The mobile education center takes a truth-telling approach, and dually serves as a forum for educating the public about the KBH and the Stolen Generations more broadly, as well as providing an opportunity for post-traumatic growth and intergenerational healing for the survivors. One of the outcomes achieved by the mobile education center is that it

. . . embeds this history and its legacies in communities across the state of NSW, reconnecting past forced removals of Aboriginal children back to the communities they were taken from, which in turn disrupts present and future generations of engaging in acts of collective forgetting about this history and its intergenerational legacies. (Porter & McComsey, this issue)

Van Marle explores the possibility of universities as sites of conscience in a context where universities have been central to imperialism and colonial nation building. Universities are an under-considered yet potentially ideal place for a site of conscience because their ongoing role in the reproduction and legitimation of imperialism and colonialism renders them both home to many “social ghosts” and places tasked with the generation of knowledge and meaning. Van Marle considers the university as a site of conscience through reflecting on the University of the Free State (South Africa) and the removal from the campus grounds of a statue of President MT Steyn, the last president of the Republic of Orange Free State. Van Marle counter-intuitively considers whether the plinth—the space that remains after the removal that might be conventionally read as legible only as a non-space—is itself a site of conscience. Here van Marle suggests that the plinth’s status as a place of removal and absence itself provides an opening to multiple possibilities and meanings. She proposes that this multiplicity means engagement with the space of the plinth can “create an atmosphere of critical reflection and contestation” (van Marle, this issue), rather than celebratory and simplistic representations of history. Together, these articles demonstrate how engaging with colonialism and its legacies—arguably inherently place-based forms of violence and injustice—challenges and deepens our understanding of the conventional meaning and purposes of sites of conscience.

This extended “site of conscience” framework also explains struggles around the recognition of injustice at existing memorials. As explored in this issue by both Davis and Goldberger, when social movements come into conflict with the state and its localized agencies at such memorial sites, pluralized and politicized memory practices must negotiate repressive notions of community and place. Davis provides an insightful analysis of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (USA), which honors the names of more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the South between 1877 and 1950, via the notion of countervisuality. She argues that attempts to place the racial violence of lynching neatly in the past are challenged by the way that the memorial, and its partner site the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, operate “to make the moral disorder of racial terrorism observable and tangible” (Davis, this issue). In this way, the activists associated with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the non-profit legal aid organization behind the Alabama Memorial and Legacy Museum, challenge the post-racial project of neoliberal urban development by tactically appropriating histories of the civil rights movement in ways that refuse to occlude the continuities of racial violence.

Similarly, Goldberger outlines an account of counter-memory practices at the Franco-era partisan monument, the Valley of the Fallen, in Madrid (Spain)—an existing memorial designed as a platform for celebratory history of General Franco’s fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, and partly built by the labor of political prisoners. In this account, Goldberger explains that conflicts over public memory are choreographed through material and symbolic landscapes. Goldberger argues that collective memory work and formal political activism, including decades-long efforts by families to exhume relatives buried in mass graves at the site, have “increasingly deconstructed” and literally “decentred” the Classical Fascist symbolism of the site (Goldberger, this issue). Despite post-Franco impunity for state crimes committed during the War and after, the monument has continued to be a focus of struggles for a “more equitable memory landscape” (Goldberger, this issue), leading to the exhumation of Franco’s body from the site in 2019 and its reburial in an alternative mausoleum. Although the Valley of the Fallen, and the Alabama Memorial and Legacy Museum, are not formal members of the Coalition, these two important studies set out the ways that such memorials provide the grounds for conversations about and transformations of rhetorical space.

Ongoing conflicts over the siting of monuments—such as statues of male pioneers and explorers and plaques commemorating specific battles or wars—in public parks, town squares, university campuses, and other public spaces can thus be seen as the “backlash” to such societal moves to pluralize memory and address historical injustice in the present. Objects such as statues and plaques commemorating historical figures might seem everyday, benign features of urban landscapes. The phenomenon of the so-called “statue wars” provokes a much-needed critique of how such monuments—shored up by memorialization as a domination of public space linked to official denials of dispossession and human rights abuses—animate and sustain settler-colonial, gendered, and racial nation-building rituals, such as military marches and their associated modalities of violence and patriarchal dominance. Because monuments and memorials shape space in the present (in the senses of the immediate public space these memorials inhabit as well as the broader space of the nation) as exclusionary and segregating (Miron, 2017), these objects can have the effect of depoliticizing cultural memory through the spatial fixing of historical narratives. Indeed, in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has been unfolding while this introduction has been written, there are emerging debates about memorialization of and during the pandemic (Otele et al., 2021; for a historical consideration of memorialization of pandemics, see Honigsbaum, 2018). Geographically diverse critiques and questions are emerging from these debates, such as how any official memorialization (or, indeed, absence of such) might reinforce racial and class dynamics in the U.S. context (Kim, 2020; Park, 2020; Savage, 2020) or how the failure to memorialize in the Indian context is intrinsically connected to hierarchies of grievability and the avoidance of accountability (Kurian, 2021).

Refusals to accept the ongoing nature of such injustice are reflected in the recent wave of movements worldwide to bring down official monuments, such as Confederate statues in the United States (for example, in Louisiana and Charlottesville: Parks, 2017), slave traders in the United Kingdom (for example, Edward Colston: Farrer, 2020), statues of British colonial explorers in Australia (for example, colonial explorer Captain Cook statues: Grant, 2017), and imperial and apartheid figures in South Africa (for example, #RhodesMustFall: Chaudhuri, 2016). These sites are intertwined in current debates about the role of racist violence in the founding of settler-colonial societies such as Canada and Australia (Cooper-Bolam, 2018) and the long trajectories of state-sponsored commemoration of Civil War heroics in the U.S. southern states (Gunter et al., 2016). Indeed, the recent protests in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, in response to the police killing of George Floyd, have renewed debate and action on monuments celebrating leading figures in slavery and colonialism. In turn, these contemporary events have prompted the official and semi-official removal of public monuments and statues of figures linked to historical human rights abuses (Mervosh et al., 2020), as well as the establishment of counter-memorials recognizing racial violence, anti-racist activism, and demands for racial equality (see, for example, the George Floyd Monument Project: Emelife, 2020). These movements and their claims for recognition of historical injustice at specific sites provide possibilities for thinking differently about monumentality and its relationship to justice (Hawes, 2015). In particular, a clear thread running through the movements against official Confederate, apartheid, and colonial monuments is the destruction of memorials themselves as an important act of counter-memorial activism and justice.

The deliberate engagement of specific sites by collectives employing counter-memory practices provides useful tools for anti-oppression and social justice activism. Much of this memory work has a clear spatial dimension and focuses on place, for the reasons we have teased out above. Practices of memorialization that manifest in a static material form, such as gardens and statues, cannot be “the final word” within such an understanding of place as performative and agentic.

Within this special issue, this approach to place as performative and agentic is explored by Wilson and Carlton, McAtackney, Guenther, and Punzi, in the contexts of resistances, reimagining, and activism surrounding former institutions. The injustices of institutionalization, and the resistance and survival of those who experienced these injustices, are often erased through the dominance of official legal and political narratives. This erasure is compounded by approaches to heritage preservation, redevelopment, and demolition of the physical sites of institutions, which de-authorizes, sentimentalize, or sensationalize the experiences of those who lived there. Sites of conscience practices might offer opportunities to counter this erasure.

Wilson and Carlton explore what those with lived experience of institutionalization can gain through sites of conscience practices. In suggesting that sites of conscience approaches are a new mode of “feminist activism,” they argue that the memorialization, preservation, and elevation of the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct (Australia) as a site of conscience by survivors of the PGH can provide an opportunity to restore personhood and political subjectivity to those who have been institutionalized and live in an ongoing and unresolved state of “incompleteness of personal and social narrative that is bound up with feelings of injustice, of trauma unresolved, and, most enduringly, of a lack of social legitimacy, in the sense of fully felt and confirmed citizenship” (Wilson & Carlton, this issue).

McAtackney explores the ways in which a sites of conscience approach might offer new ways to memorialize the Magdalen Laundries (Ireland) in a context of “a recent mandate from survivors of Magdalen Laundries to focus on meaningful and active memorialization of their experiences” (McAtackney, this issue). Focusing on what might be possible at the Sean MacDermott Street and Donnybrook Laundries (the two remaining Dublin-based sites), McAtackney argues that one of the strengths of sites of conscience frameworks is their resistance to homogeneous and singular narratives but openness to the diverse perspectives and experiences of survivors.

In her article, Punzi explores the possibilities of sites of conscience approaches in countering the erasure of the memories of psychiatric institutionalization through redevelopment. Punzi focuses on Långbro mental hospital (Sweden), which has been redeveloped into a residential area while being memorialized through a digital museum that renders the former hospital itself a “non-place” by marginalizing the experiences of patients and focusing on the beauty and functionality of the buildings. Punzi argues that a digital site of conscience might provide alternative ways of recognizing and engaging with ongoing psychiatric injustices, and thus situate the hospital in a broader political context, even in the face of the material erasure of the site itself.

Guenther explores sites of conscience in the context of prison incarceration. Guenther approaches this through nuanced reflection on the meaning of “conscience” in “site of conscience,” arguably an under-theorized aspect in sites of conscience scholarship. In the context of the former Prison for Women in Kingston (Canada), Guenther argues that conscience is a relationship rather than an individual affective state: “. . .conscience is not just a matter of acknowledging that something terrible happened in the past, it is a way of feeling-together the traces of suffering, survival, resistance, and resurgence that spiral out of a particular place.” She thus proposes that a site of conscience is “a place where collective sensing and sensemaking unfold, and to which we return again and again in rituals of care,” and that such a place “weaves together future, past, and present in a non-linear ethics of place” (Guenther, this issue). On this basis, Guenther argues that a site of conscience at the Prison for Women does not provide an opportunity for non-incarcerated folks to “walk in the shoes” or “wring their hands” in performances of empathy and guilt, but rather to be connected to others and to land, and to work together to forge new ways to understand and be in the world (including in the context of alternatives to incarceration). Together, these articles highlight the possibilities of sites of conscience to counterintuitively use the places and memories of institutions in the service of resistance and transformation.

Top-down memorialization practices can run counter to (and actively work to impede) social justice struggles because they tend to assert and embed within place singular and oppressive versions of history and negate alternative experiences and perspectives that ground demands of justice voiced by marginalized communities. Seen in this light, counter-memorial practices, when they surface in unofficial or official alternative public sites, can address the “structures of forgetting” implicit in nation-building monumentality. In this vein, the work by Kusumaningrum et al. and Leong in this special issue contributes to this scholarship and activism on counter-memorialization. Both Kusumaningrum et al. and Leong expose the ongoing legacies of the 1965 Indonesian politicide, and the unsettling potential of counter-memorial practices linked to sites that are associated with historical violence, and directly in conflict with state-sponsored memorial projects.

Kusumaningrum et al. provide a critical account of the “Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace” project, which tables survivor testimonies through walking tours of the city of Yogyakarta (Indonesia), revisiting unacknowledged sites of past suffering. By creating opportunities for inter-generational conversations about the events of 1965, these tours “expose the past harms that are embedded in Yogyakarta’s landscape, producing a counter-geography to what is otherwise known as a city of peace and tolerance” (Kusumaningrum et al., this issue).

Leong, in his ethnographic account of place-making via the figure of the juru kunci (gatekeeper or caretaker) at a series of reputed mass grave sites in Central Java (Indonesia), describes how former political prisoners mobilize rituals of place and time to overturn public and political silences. In conversations between living survivors of the events of 1965 and deceased victims of the Suharto regime, mediated by the juru kunci, the human, more-than-human, material, and the ethereal all conspire to refuse historical closure and perpetuate counter-narratives of the past.

Challenges From and Within Sites of Conscience

Specific Sites of Conscience have emerged in response to diverse harms and injustices, including institutional abuse, war, disappearance, environmental disaster, genocide, racial apartheid, and labor exploitation (Ashton & Wilson, 2014, 2019). The techniques of placemaking engaged by the Sites of Conscience coalition members intersect with recent activist and art practices, which engage with “difficult,” abjected, silenced or marginal histories, populations and places that fall outside of sentimental national historical narratives (Ashton & Wilson, 2014, 2019; Dwyer & Alderman, 2008; Ferres, 2013; Gordon, 2008; Hibberd & Djuric, 2013; Kryder-Reid, 2016; Till, 2005, 2008). By disrupting linear understandings of history and the singularity of memory in place, sites of conscience potentially challenge dominant public narratives, decentre epistemic authority, and complicate conventionally understood relationships between place, spatiality, temporality, materiality, and justice (Steele et al., 2020). Writing more broadly about practices that Parragirls developed when responding to the Parramatta Girls Home site and memory in the present, Hibberd (2019) argues that mobilizing and pluralizing place challenges dominant “institutional knowledge [in order] to offer a model of human-centered, collective knowledge production, to learn not about but from” contested sites (p. 136). These observations are applicable to the Sites of Conscience ethos.

Sites of conscience thus frame past events as injustices having an ongoing presence and dynamism within contemporary political contexts, by connecting past, present, and future, and putting memory into action (Foote, 1998; Jones, 2015; Tumarkin, 2019). Sites of conscience can disrupt and transform our understandings and practices of law, justice, human rights, and democracy (Ashton & Wilson, 2014; Douglas, 2017; Orange, 2016; Steele et al., 2020), and further, they can situate place and space as central dynamics of injustice and justice and repair, rather than the background context in which action takes place. Here, there are resonances with law and humanities scholarship challenging official legal narratives of history to re-imagine the relationship between law and justice, through materiality and place, and in ways that disrupt and redress settler colonialism (Balint et al., 2020; Douglas, 2017; Le Roux & van Marle, 2007; Motha, 2018). As forms of place-based knowledges of the past and claims for equality and justice in the present, they resist a singular truth and instead open opportunities for dialogue, thereby creating the possibility for multiple meanings and experiences of the places to which they relate (Djuric, 2014; Hibberd, 2014).

At this moment, Sites of Conscience as a movement faces particular challenges associated with place. The increasing value of real property seen in recent decades might impede access to sites that have highly charged valency for marginalized groups and communities. Redevelopment, privatization, and gentrification can give rise to processes of erasure of material traces of place and event, and the physical displacement of marginalized populations, and sever any opportunities for affected populations to have ownership or custodianship of these places (see, e.g., Betiks, 2012; Guenther, 2018). Most recently, the global COVID-19 pandemic and associated physical distancing and lockdown requirements, coupled with emerging austerity measures, have had significant impacts on the GLAM (“galleries, libraries, archives, and museums”) sector, prompting a turn to digital and virtual spaces out of necessity to continue work (Feinstein, 2020). Scholars and activists are just beginning to reflect on the shifting role of public space in memorialization and place-based activism by reason of the pandemic (Kim, 2020). ICoSoC has recognized the need for Sites of Conscience to adapt and challenge processes of surveillance and control that are emerging alongside the entrenchment and intensification of previously existing forms of discrimination and marginalization (ICoSoC, 2020a). While memorialization in virtual spaces or through digital technologies precedes the pandemic (Zucker & Simon, 2019; and see, e.g., Doig-Acuna, 2018), the pandemic demands reflection on how an ongoing shift to digital and virtual spaces transforms and attenuates our connection to place and materiality, which can be so central to sites of conscience frameworks.

As Kinstler demonstrates in her study of a digital “memory object” produced by the U.K.-based human rights research agency Forensic Architecture to capture the testimony of a witness to a fatal drone strike on civilians in North Waziristan, Pakistan in 2010, such objects preserve “spatial knowledge, yet [do] so at the cost of embodied, affective, testimonial knowledge” (Kinstler, this issue). In a critique akin to that mounted by Andrew and Hibberd of the need to decolonize the notion of territory, and to supplant it via the concept of “zones of trauma,” Kinstler’s analysis of the cultural form of the virtual memory object demonstrates that it precedes and invisiblises the systemic violence of the “war on terror.” Representations of historical violence have to contend with the simultaneous disappearance and excess of evidence, Kinstler concludes, as the production of virtual testimony reduces the evidentiary agency of lived experience.

Similarly, Aguilera takes a critical look at performances of memory at a paradigmatic Site of Conscience, Santiago’s (Chile) Villa Grimaldi, through the lens of a wave of protests against economic inequality in the capital since 2019. Aguilera finds that the narrative of human rights, which is predominant in the peaceful overcoming of Pinochet’s past, invoked and performed at the site, makes challenges to the neoliberal economic model “installed by the regime and preserved relatively unchanged following the return of democracy” difficult to be heard (Aguilera, this issue). Thus, the case of Villa Grimaldi demonstrates that even at official Sites of Conscience, radical impulses and deeper political conflicts may be pushed aside if they do not fit dominant narratives and prevailing political ideologies, such as a hegemonic narrative of human rights. Aguilera concludes that “dark ruins” are more likely to surface such complex interpretations of history than neatly landscaped memorials, and she calls for a recovery of utopian projects via the decomposition of space and time that ruination provokes.

Furthermore, while activists working within sites of conscience frameworks seek to overcome the limitations and harms of official history and memorials discussed above, they still encounter challenges in achieving their goals. For example, ICoSoC recently suspended the membership of the National Center for Historical Memory in Bogotá, Colombia, following concerns raised about “biased and excluding public statements made on behalf of the Center” (ICoSoC, 2020c).

As we have earlier explored, sites of conscience practices—with their focus on connections between place and justice—offer possibilities for recognizing Indigenous and First Nations knowledges, self-determination and sovereignty through their connection to Country and for reckoning with the centrality of dispossession and displacement to settler colonial violence. However, criticisms might also be made of the “whiteness” or “colonial” nature of memorialization and sites of conscience practices, which can result in the affirmation of Indigenous and First Nations land dispossession and settler-colonial rule. For example, it is proposed that it is inherently problematic and itself an act of injustice and violence to memorialize other injustices on land that is itself at the core of Indigenous dispossession, displacement, and genocide (Chalmers, 2019), paralleling scholarship on the erasure of settler colonial injustice through the whiteness of heritage (Stasiuk & Hibberd, 2017). Scholars and practitioners utilizing sites of conscience frameworks must move beyond a singular set of injustices and grapple with how to engage with multiple (intersecting) histories of injustice and settler-colonialism (Guenther, 2018; Steele et al., 2020). Relatedly, there are potential challenges in utilizing sites of conscience frameworks that situate injustice “in place” in the context of the transnational flows of violence and power that characterize coloniality. This challenge is observed by Moshenska (2018) in the context of the ICoSoC member “Museum of British Colonialism”:

Laying the foundation stones of a Museum of British Colonialism is a daunting task. How do you tell a story four centuries long, that touches upon nearly every modern nation on earth? This is a story that shaped seafaring, industrial capitalism, art, food, drugs, religion, music, war, sex, gardening and the English language. This history is almost impossible to contain in one space and as the Museum of British Colonialism we aim to demonstrate an alternative approach. As the perpetrator nation, Britain should carry the weight of imperial history and pay the costs, but it is not primarily a British story to tell.

There is also the possibility that when sites of conscience practices are situated only within human rights frameworks, consideration of a broader range of political possibilities may be foreclosed (Vázquez Guevara, 2019; Aguilera, this issue).

We are still identifying and grappling with the full range of purposes and possibilities, as well as limitations and risks of sites of conscience practices, in what remains a nascent field of scholarship on such sites. This open-ended exploration is underscored by Tumarkin (2019), a long-term scholar of sites of conscience, in her speculative contribution to this issue on making space for ongoing memory work on gendered violence. In contrast to memorialization and commemoration approaches that enable closure, historicization, and conciliation, Tumarkin proposes that sites of conscience provoke “incitement to an ongoing public reckoning with something that is far from over” and are “nonconciliatory” (Tumarkin, this issue). Tumarkin proposes that sites of conscience methodologies can provide possibilities for materializing the ongoing presence, continuities, and impacts of structural violence in the present. Making this argument in the specific context of gendered violence, Tumarkin suggests that sites of conscience frameworks makes possible a “site dedicated to keeping the fact of gendered violence’s dogged persistence alive in the public imagination as a wound that refuses to scab, let alone heal” (Tumarkin, this issue). Through identifying a range of questions to inform the development of such a site of conscience, Tumarkin highlights the tension between the place-based nature of sites of conscience that orients us toward locating gendered violence in a specific place, and the systemic and diffused nature of gendered violence that speaks to its pervasiveness and endurance across space and time. Tumarkin’s questions offer us a provocative opportunity to grapple with some of the more challenging aspects of sites of conscience frameworks at the intersections of structural violence, place, and temporality, and in doing so, to broaden and re-imagine what it can mean to do justice through memory and place.

This special issue advances and deepens responses to the questions that specific Sites of Conscience and sites of conscience framings raise. For example, the role of neoliberal governmentality in particular in actively privatizing and commodifying public space is an ongoing question that needs further work to be done in connection with sites of conscience. The potentials of listening differently to contestations of official memory through the resourcing and skill sharing of the Sites of Conscience network can also help key potentials of specific sites to be realized and new claims for equality to be articulated and heard. The case studies explored in this special issue highlight how sites of conscience frameworks help investigate the productive conjunctures of place, historical events, political forces, activist networks, and social memories, and what “action” can mean when these conjunctures are visibly engaged. The issue also identifies sites of conscience frameworks and practices that offer hopeful tools for activists and scholars engaged in anti-oppression and social justice. Finally, the special issue aims to consider how place is best engaged with analytically through sites of conscience frameworks that enliven new spaces and materialize practices of justice. The special issue as a whole seeks, through a combination of interdisciplinary academic inquiry, storytelling, and visual documentation of individual contributors, to interweave these threads in new and unsettling ways. Ultimately, we intend the special issue to give scholars, activists, and practitioners an enriched appreciation of the role of place by engaging sites of conscience frameworks, and the critical tools to achieve social justice in and through place.