Interdisciplinary M.A. Program
in Cultural Production

Important theoretical and practical issues in the field include:

• Who should have principal say in the design and implementation of public memorials? Primary financial donors? Public officials and elected representatives? The close relatives of victims? Leaders of organizations that represent affected communities? Should perpetrators of injustice or their descendants have a voice in the memorial development process?
• What are the most equitable and effective strategies for consulting with those who have a profound stake in memorials and monuments to the lost?
• To what can and should memorial forms seek to “heal” the wounds and agony of the tragedies and losses they commemorate? To what extent should such memorials seek to expose and reemphasize the raw, unsettled ruptures associated with loss and violent assault?
• In what respects are public memorial undertakings embedded in the symbolic “work” of the nation-state? Under what circumstances do and should memorial practices interrogate the symbolic and moral centrality of the state?
• How directly should the architecture and design elements of memorial sites signify or evoke precise circumstances of violence, death or loss? How overtly or subtly should possibilities of regeneration or reconstitution be signaled?
• In what respects are memorial markers or structures to be understood as substitute or compensatory bodies for the dead?
• When and how are figurative forms, including those representing or evoking the human face, to be incorporated into such projects? When are nonfigurative or nonrepresentational forms most appropriate?
• Under what circumstances should memorials be beautiful? Ugly?
• What are metonymic strategies (part standing for whole) most appropriate or effective? When should there be one-to-one correspondences between each specific loss and particular sign forms, such as a cross, a tree, a stone or an inscribed name? Under what circumstances should collective loss be primarily evoked by sign forms that do not denote individual loss?
• How are natural elements, including water, stone, fire, trees and vegetation, to be effectively deployed in memorial projects?
• Why do so many people leave spontaneous memorials (including wreaths, flowers, letters to the dead and other material material objects) at permanent memorial sites, including offerings in honor of persons they have never known directly? Are such practices to be understood as exchanges with the dead, as propitation, as projection of the self into the “imagined community” of the nation or other collectivities? Should such spontaneous or ephemeral presentations by actively encouraged? How should they be documented, conserved or incorporated into ongoing memorial undertakings?
• What performance genres, including the recitation of names, music, dance, theater and poetry, are suited for commemorative action? How are such public programs to be equitably designed, developed and implemented?
• How are we to theorize and research memorial practices that are not directly tied to physical locales or material objects, including Web sites and other electronic media projects dedicated to the memory of the dead?
• In the context of the United States, what forms might as yet undeveloped national memorials take, including those to slavery, lynching and genocidal violence against Native Americans?