I Wrote a Book 📖😳

WHY 🤔

I spent four years on a project dear to my heart which resulted in my PhD thesis. As rewarding as that entire process felt — despite its many hurdles — it did not conclude the project for me. Science should not be done behind closed doors or in ivory towers, it should intend to have an impact on society. So I wanted my humble project to be accessible to as many people as possible. That is why I applied for a grant to have it published open access: so that everyone who wants to, can read it and hopefully find some inspiration or actionable ideas in it.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT🗿

I have always been curious about how people feel “at home in the world,” especially when their world tries to tell them that they do not belong, that they are Other. One public and official way to tell the story of who belongs within a nation is through public memory. These stories (a selection of historical events and figures) can be communicated very visibly through memorials situated in public spaces, officially stating which humans and values a nation deems valuable.

Before the global spread of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020, I started wondering about the impact of celebratory memorials to members of marginalized communities. At this point in 2019, there were some conversations about problematic memorials but only few about the lack of diverse representation in the public realm, so I asked myself: What is the relevance of celebratory memorials to members of marginalized communities? Do they actually matter and if so, how? And, expanding from there, I started wondering what people are even doing at these memorials: What is the experience at a memorial which does not stand in a historically significant place but people still travel to see it?

To answer these questions I wanted to speak with experts but mostly (many) visitors of such sites to find out how they engage with the sites and the narratives they encounter there.

WHY DC 🇺🇸

So many reasons, some of them personal. One of the most important ones, however, was that DC is not just the political but also the symbolic capital of the US. Individuals honored here receive the “ultimate” stamp of approval for being an important person to the entire nation. So I wanted to study visitors of memorial sites in an “extreme” and highly significant environment.

WHY MLK 👑

One main reason: Dr. King is the only member of any marginalized community, commemorated on DC’s National Mall: the country’s prime location for communication who is important to this nation.

WHICH MEMORIALS 📍

The MLK Memorial, opened in 2011, is a standalone memorial just on the edge of the Mall, right on the tidal basin and encompasses several structures exclusively dedicated to King. Visitors who come here explicitly seek out this memorial (1) to see it with their own eyes because it is such an extraordinary, unlikely, site and (2) because they want to pay tribute to King.

The engraving for King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. People stumble upon this marker or miss it altogether. The handful who visit the Lincoln Memorial because of the March on Washington want to marvel at the physical space and transport themselves back in time, but they hardly use the marker for this (or even see it). Mostly, visitors go to the Lincoln because it is the most impressive and recognizable memorial in DC, marking their trip as significant and a "success."

WHAT ARE VISITORS DOING THERE 📸

In the context of DC, public memory and tourism are inherently intertwined. When visitors travel to these two sites, it is often as part of a tourism experience and their intention is to make the commemorated narratives or events relevant to their personal lives. Because they understand that public memory is not simply history: it is not primarily about what happened in the past but about its relevance for today and what we want to learn from it for the future.

The MLK Memorial was mostly visited to witness the country's official sanctioning of a group that has been marginalized and neglected in many history courses. People want to see it to make sure it is there and they want to witness their country officially celebrating King and the movement for which he stands.

While, as an outsider, I did not explicitly study the relevance of the memorials to the African American community, the incredible significance of “seeing someone who looks like me honored in the Capital” in the statue of Dr.King came through in almost every interview. For these individuals, seeing the statue and making sure “it is real and impressive” was an important experience that was immediately relevant to their lives.

The personal relevance of the memorial in general was difficult to pinpoint, as there is very little about the actual achievements of the movement on site: What can still be felt today of the movements' success is activated by being at the site but visitors must carry this knowledge and awareness with them to the memorial.

At the Lincoln Memorial, the experience was entirely different. The marker itself only has value as an activation of a historical (mediated!) memory: people look out onto the vast space of the Mall and imagine the historical event. However, due to the discreet nature of the marker, many don’t realize that this is where that historical event took place and even more do not make any connections to today. This location holds vast opportunities to activate in visitors stories of public memory, which could easily be implemented through digital augmentations on site.

To make the stories told by the memorials relevant for their own lives, currently, visitors mostly take pictures, because there is not much else to do. Taking a picture assigns value to the site and makes the visit part of the travel exeperience and, thereby, visitors can use photographs to negotiate their identities ("I am someone who cares about X, that's why I went there"). This can be taken a step further by posting the images online and thereby framing oneself as a person who cares about the narratives represented by the sites. This is mostly done through visual allegiance: by simply posting an image of a site associated with a specific narrative, visitors say “this is what I stand for!” The fact that they travelled to the site makes this statement even stronger.

How exactly the visitors engage with the two memorials on Instagram differs based on the nature of the site: you’re going to have to read that chapter to find out more, it's a fun one 😉

What people do not do in site is learn about the commemorated person or events. This is mostly due to the fact that information at the two sites is scarce and almost impossible to find for many. This is one of the findings where further action is necessary, despite "learning" not being a main motivating factor to visit: Once people are on site, many are disappointed when they cannot learn anything about the commemorated individual.

WHAT NOW? 💪

Celebratory memorials to marginalized communities matter. Not only because they help in more accurately showing actual history, but especially because they show an officially sanctioned appreciation for the contributions by marginalized individuals to the “American success story.”

They must be placed in symbolically significant places to attribute value to the commemorated narratives because this is what shows appreciation. The fact that DC's National Mall represents a limited celebration is owed to geographical constraints and a necessary selection of stories. However, the homogenous nature of the stories told in this most important symbolic space also speaks volumes about the nation's public memory.

However, instead of just placing impressive statues of individuals in DC as well as in front of City Halls or in public parks — thereby tokenizing those individuals who hardly ever achieved anything in isolation — public memory should be celebrated in the everyday. Akin to the Holocaust stumbling stones, everyday memorials to the Civil Rights Movement could be placed in locations where its achievement can be felt today: at lunch counters or water fountains, for example. The markers can be discreet, they do not in themselves have to honor the past; they must activate its relevance for the presence. In an age where we can have augmentation for everything, might we not use it to augment our everyday physical spaces every now and again to become aware of the privileges we experience, and who made them possible? This could help more individuals experience public memory as what it really is: a narrative from the past with an impact on our personal lives today. The work of making history relevant to today should not fall completely on the visitor, memorials have a duty to enable that process.

WHAT DO YOU DO 🔎

You can read the book forever online. You can just sneak into different chapters or look at the pictures (there are many of them!!). I included crucial but not exactly entertaining chapters such as the methodology in favor of scietific transparency but you don’t have to read that unless you want to collaborate with me on a follow-up project 😉