Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present is a response to debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of emotion. This timely and unique book explores the ways emotion is embroiled and used in contemporary engagements with the past, particularly in contexts such as heritage sites, museums, commemorations, political rhetoric and ideology, debates over issues of social memory, and touristic uses of heritage sites.
Including contributions from academics and practitioners in a range of countries, the book reviews significant and conflicting academic debates on the nature and expression of affect and emotion. As a whole, the book makes an argument for a pragmatic understanding of affect and, in doing so, outlines Wetherell’s concept of affective practice, a concept utilised in most of the chapters in this book. Since debates about affect and emotion can often be confusing and abstract, the book aims to clarify these debates and, through the use of case studies, draw out their implications for theory and practice within heritage and museum studies.
Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present should be essential reading for students, academics, and professionals in the fields of heritage and museum studies. The book will also be of interest to those in other disciplines, such as social psychology, education, archaeology, tourism studies, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, and history.
1. Introduction: affective heritage practices Margaret Wetherell, Laurajane Smith, and Gary Campbell Part I: Commemoration and remembering 2. Labour of love and devotion? The search for the lost soldiers of Russia Johanna Dahlin 3. Troubling heritage: intimate pasts and public memories at Derry/Londonderry’s ‘temple’Margo Shea 4. Commemoration, affective practice, and the difficult histories of war Amy McKernan and Julie McLeod 5. Constructing heritage through subjectivity: Museum of Broken Relationships Željka Miklošević and Darko Babić 6. The Battle of Orgreave (1984) Toby Juliff Part II: Belonging and exclusion 7. Apologising for past wrongs: emotion-reason rhetoric in political discourse Martha Augoustinos, Brianne Hastie and Peta Callaghan 8. Experiencing mixed emotions in the museum: empathy, affect, and memory in visitors’ responses to histories of migration Rhiannon Mason, Katherine Lloyd, Areti Galani and Joanne Sayner 9. Coming undone: protocols of emotion in Canadian human rights museology Jennifer Claire Robinson 10. Touring the post-conflict city: negotiating affects during Belfast’s black cab mural tours Katie Markham 11.. Performing affection, constructing heritage? Civil and political mobilisations around the Ottoman legacy in Bulgaria Ivo Strahilov and Slavka Karakusheva Part III: Learning, teaching and engaging 12. Understanding the emotional regimes of reconciliation in engagements with ‘difficult’ heritage Michalinos Zembylas 13. Affective practices of learning at the museum: children’s critical encounters with the past Dianne Mulcahy and Andrea Witcomb 14. White guilt and shame: students’ emotional reactions to digital stories of race in a South African classroom Daniela Gachago, Vivienne Bozalek and Dick Ng’ambi 15. Settler-Indigenous relationships and the emotional regime of empathy in Australian history school textbooks in times of reconciliation Angelique Stastny 16. ‘Head and heart’ responses to treaty education in Aotearoa New Zealand: feeling the timeline of colonisation Ingrid Huygens 17. Raw emotion: the Living Memory module at three sites of practice Celmara Pocock, Marion Stell and Geraldine Mate Index
Laurajane Smith is Professor and Director of the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Margaret Wetherell is Professor of Social Psychology in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Emerita Professor in Social Sciences at the Open University, UK. Gary Campbell is an independent researcher based in Canberra, Australia, and is affiliated with the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University.
Reviews for Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present
'Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present is a welcome addition to the literature about emotion and affect in heritage studies. The contributors set out to deconstruct theoretically how individuals respond when they encounter heritage in its various manifestations, and how they are affected and what they feel. Particularly helpful are those chapters which rely on visitor studies and move beyond the academy into the field to explore how people engage with the past and relate it to the present in an emotional and affective manner. Thus this book provides students and academics alike with useful insights into the ways in which the turn to emotion has engaged scholars of critical heritage studies, and it will be of use to all who wish to develop a greater understanding of heritage and its impact on individuals and society in general.' Sheila Watson, University of Leicester, UK 'The objective of this book is to bring forward emotion and affectivity in museum and heritage institutions and studies. As a result, this collected edition is not only timely, it also covers an essential theme in Heritage Studies that has been largely left aside or remains, at best, an implicit element in many professional and academic works. Simply put, this is a collected edition that should be influential for years to come.' Jonathan Paquette, University of Ottawa, USA
