Research Projects
Places
My research into difficult heritage seeks to understand how traumatic events continue to shape present day experiences of place, place-making, and belonging. I am particularly interested in the pedagogical power of traumatic memory to advance or impede social change, with an emphasis on cultural narratives of resilience, reconciliation, and historical justice. Conducting an in-depth, institutional ethnography of the National September 11th Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center, for example, my work on 9/11 heritage critically interrogates dominant narratives of cultural memory and its racialized ‘others.’ I investigated how World Trade Center redevelopment redefined social identities and political subjectivities in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Here, the cultural politics of ‘post-9/11 America’ reflected a broader internalization of geopolitical processes as the state and its citizens grappled with the changing meaning of “safety” and “security” in a globalized world.
Archives
As part of a participatory action research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (PI Alison Mountz), I have worked collaboratively with anti-war activists to shape and document the outcomes of U.S. “Stop Loss” policies on soldiers serving in the global war on terror. Focusing on oral histories with a cross-border community of U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans seeking political asylum in Canada, this research navigated transnational histories of deportation and intergenerational narratives of trauma and social justice, since the Vietnam Era. This research foregrounds public scholarship by establishing a first-of-its-kind, institutional archive to house this important history at the University of Toronto (home of the Vietnam Era resister archives), as well as a series of public history installations throughout Southern Ontario. Documenting and preserving this history for future researchers, peace activist, and war resisters alike, a secondary goal of this archive is to supply future generations of resisters with the historical— and legal— frameworks needed to effectively resist U.S. militarism in their search for asylum.
Design
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is an institutional forerunner in experience-oriented, immersive museum design and pedagogy, innovating experiential engagements and emotional learning outcomes through heritage design. Such museums utilize design strategies—e.g., spatial arrangement, pacing and movement, lighting, etc.—to facilitate evocative, embodied experiences for site visitors in real-time. Such design prioritizes spatiality and the evocative dynamics of heritage environments to generate visceral, embodied experiences for site visitors. Although the relationships between memory and place, affect and emotion, and identity and community, are well-documented in the scholarly literature, the incorporation of pre-cognitive and pre-verbal experiences of heritage tourism is long overdue. I am currently developing an innovative methodology for evaluating visitor experiences of difficult heritage environments using medical-grade wearables. This research is done in collaboration with the USHMM, as well as with my colleagues and co-researchers, Dr. Angela M. Person and Chris Black (University of Oklahoma).
