Memorial making and unmaking in key neighbourhood sites of violence in Britain and the United States

Turner, Jennifer Ann (2024) Memorial making and unmaking in key neighbourhood sites of violence in Britain and the United States. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis examines ordinary, contemporary sites such as houses and schools in Britain and US that have become associated with violence. Examining how communities have negotiated memory as they have rehabilitated, demolished, rebuilt, or marked sites of violence, it contextualises these neighbourhood sites in a wider heritage studies context and provides a more nuanced account of these sites that are often under-read and over-simplified. Through four case studies, bringing a range of distinctive aspects of memory into the foreground, I interrogate the processes of local decision-making. Identifying points of conflict and indecision, these cases elucidate how memory and non-memory have been negotiated. The introduction sets out the key debates in memory studies in which the cases are situated. Chapter one demonstrates how public attention in the aftermath of a school shooting, however sympathetic, led to the creation of Dunblane as a site of non-memory. Chapter two argues that the guilt and shaming of the perpetrators of the 18 Victory Road house fire complicated the possibility of grieving for the victims and fashioned the location as a perpetrator site and as a site of non-memory. Chapter three examines three dramatic productions responding to the murder of sex workers in Ipswich. It argues that diminished victimhood enabled a process of rectification on London Road. Chapter four demonstrates how resistance to memorialisation and the clearing of the neighbourhood around the Sandy Hook Elementary School has resulted in a heavily-managed memorial. These case studies collectively complicate the outcomes of neighbourhood sites of violence. The research argues for the recognition of neighbourhood decision-making as discursive sites of memory, emphasises the necessity of understanding the importance of spontaneous shrines in the setting of the neighbourhood, and frames the actions sanctification, designation, rectification, and obliteration alongside the concept of sites of non-memory.

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