Memory, Place, Museums and Commemoration

Huw Halstead (St Andrews), 'Earth is earth': landscape, belonging and in-situ displacement in Thessaly (Greece)

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, an extensive land redistribution scheme drastically redrew the local topography in Western Thessaly (Greece) in a short space of time, fundamentally altering working and social practices and the markers of everyday familiarity: the faces, the food, the landmarks, the smells, routes walked daily, and fields worked for a lifetime. This led to significant economic development and technological modernisation, but also triggered a sense of loss and place alienation amongst local inhabitants. This paper shows how this ‘in situ displacement’ arises from tangible changes to inhabitants’ everyday bodily and sensory experiences of place. This is revealed not only in locals’ narratives about the past, but also their contemporary ways of moving through, marking, and manipulating the spaces around them.

(Huw completed his PhD at York in 2017, and is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of History, University of St Andrews.  His book, Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging and Memory Amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey, has just been published by Routledge.)

Dan Johnson (York), ‘Museums and (mis)representation: female convicts in British prison museums’

(Dan is a final-year History Department PhD student working on prison museums in the UK.)

Sophie Vohra (York), ‘Using the past to shape the future: the movement of objects and narratives in commemorations of British railways’

(Sophie is a final-year PhD student on a Collaborative Doctoral Award in the History Department and the National Railway Museum, working on the commemorative cultures of railways in Britain.)