Karen Till
Maynooth University, Geography, Faculty Member
- National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Geography, Faculty Memberadd
- Geography, Feminist Theory, Art Theory, Visual Arts, Site-Specific Art and Performance, Performance Studies, and 16 moreCommunity-based art, performance and dialogue, Performance Art and Public Spaces, Space and Place, Space And Place (Art), Place, Place Attachment, Understanding the Publicness of Public Places, Urban Regeneration and The Future of Cities, Cultural Spaces in The Contemporary Urban Landscape, Urban Ecology, Urban Landscape, Urban Studies, Urbanism, Qualitative Research Methods, Activist Ethnography, Ethnography of urban spaces, ethnography, comparative visual media, humanitarianism, human rights, biopolitics, Marxist critique, postcolonial studies, documentary studies, critical theory and cultural studies, posthumanism, animal studies, discourses of the child, and Joan Trontoedit
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Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic facades to depict future urban... more
Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic facades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine. Although these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first 15 years of Berlin’s post- unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center might replace this former GDR parliamentary building. Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Kobberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms that led down into those sites. Their artistic excavation- installation, Turn It One More Time (2006–2008), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the division. Now, rather than leading upwards, the excavations led downwards and offered a new view into the history of a place.” Kobberling and Kaltwasser also observed how the “view” of the city from their platforms encouraged visitors to encounter the urban natural environment. The artists listed on a large billboard at the site the diverse array of plants in the overgrown fields they excavated according to their biological species. For the artists,
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This chapter examines the Hannah Arendt Denkraum (2006) exhibition in Berlin that was displayed in former Jewish Girls School, which at the time was an ‘empty’ building located in former East Berlin. Through the exhibition, this building... more
This chapter examines the Hannah Arendt Denkraum (2006) exhibition in Berlin that was displayed in former Jewish Girls School, which at the time was an ‘empty’ building located in former East Berlin. Through the exhibition, this building – which was violently made into a ruin under National Socialism – was again reanimated as a historical place of Jewish life and culture in Berlin. While legal restitution by the Jewish Claims Conference prevented the building from being quickly redeveloped following reunification, creative practices and later renovation resulted in ‘dignity restoration’ (Atuahene, 2014). As a form of repair, dignity restoration enhances spatial justice in ways that are often ignored by urban managers who prioritise economic development. The chapter discusses how the exhibition reclaimed a historical place from a ruin of spatial injustice in the wounded city of Berlin by calling attention to the loss of Jewish life and political thought in the city.
Heather Merrill’s An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) was the subject of a provocative, inspiring, and sometimes contentious ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the 2007 AAG... more
Heather Merrill’s An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) was the subject of a provocative, inspiring, and sometimes contentious ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the 2007 AAG meeting in San Francisco. This was the second in a series of sessions sponsored by the Qualitative Research Specialty Group that highlighted the first books of authors who advance the field of qualitative research in innovative ways. The panelists in the session—Patricia Ehrkamp, Linda McDowell, Katherine McKittrick, Heidi Nast, and Alison Mountz—acknowledged in quite distinct ways how Heather’s research raised difficult questions regarding the agendas, politics and practices of transnational feminisms in (postcolonial) Europe. As there was not enough time to discuss the remarkably diverse set of responses and insights raised by the author, panelists and audience, we decided to continue this conversation through the pages of this review forum
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Memorial Museums seeks to interpret critically ‘the emerging but under-explored field of memorial museums’ (p. 22) and to provide an international survey and evaluation of historic site museums that document, commemorate, and represent... more
Memorial Museums seeks to interpret critically ‘the emerging but under-explored field of memorial museums’ (p. 22) and to provide an international survey and evaluation of historic site museums that document, commemorate, and represent events of human atrocity. Such a study has been long overdue. However, Memorial Museums, which could have made a significant contribution to this ‘global institutional development’ (p. 8), provides neither a systematic examination of the history and types of memorial museums that now exist, nor a theoretically sophisticated study. Instead, this random collection of superficially described examples must be judged a missed opportunity
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So-called temporary uses of urban space, including ‘pop ups’ or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of vacancy. Yet the ways in which these... more
So-called temporary uses of urban space, including ‘pop ups’ or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of vacancy. Yet the ways in which these urban innovations are conceived, studied and evaluated continue to reify a capitalist framework of development and conceptual understanding of the city that valorises exchange value and permanence. The result is that little empirical research exists about smaller projects that offer the city and its residents many non-monetary benefits. In this article, we argue that evaluating urban space according to the dichotomy of permanent or temporary land use is problematic: it misses the fluidity and multiple rhythms of how places are made and spaces experienced that are inherent to the regular life of any city. Rather than temporary use, we use the concept of ‘interim space’ to consider projects that may be responsive to local needs and available resources....
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Heather Merrill’s An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) was the subject of a provocative, inspiring, and sometimes contentious ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the 2007 AAG... more
Heather Merrill’s An Alliance of Women: Immigration and the Politics of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) was the subject of a provocative, inspiring, and sometimes contentious ‘Author Meets Critics’ session at the 2007 AAG meeting in San Francisco. This was the second in a series of sessions sponsored by the Qualitative Research Specialty Group that highlighted the first books of authors who advance the field of qualitative research in innovative ways. The panelists in the session—Patricia Ehrkamp, Linda McDowell, Katherine McKittrick, Heidi Nast, and Alison Mountz—acknowledged in quite distinct ways how Heather’s research raised difficult questions regarding the agendas, politics and practices of transnational feminisms in (postcolonial) Europe. As there was not enough time to discuss the remarkably diverse set of responses and insights raised by the author, panelists and audience, we decided to continue this conversation through the pages of this review forum. An Allianc...
Walking from North King Street in Dublin's inner city, we arrived on Upper Dorset Street at the performance venue, the historic birthplace of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. We bumped into Louise Lowe and 0wen Boss, artistic... more
Walking from North King Street in Dublin's inner city, we arrived on Upper Dorset Street at the performance venue, the historic birthplace of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. We bumped into Louise Lowe and 0wen Boss, artistic directors of ANU Productions who, in collaboration with artistic director of CoisCeim Dance Theatre, David Bolger, created These Rooms, the performance we had come to see. As the production was about to start, we headed to the fiont door to collect our tickets.
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Dr. Karen Till is Professor of Cultural Geography at Maynooth University, director of the Space & Place Research Collaborative (Ireland), and founding co-Convener of the Mapping Spectral Traces international network of artists,... more
Dr. Karen Till is Professor of Cultural Geography at Maynooth University, director of the Space & Place Research Collaborative (Ireland), and founding co-Convener of the Mapping Spectral Traces international network of artists, practitioners, and scholars. Till’s 2005 book, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, explores German memory and modernity, showing how places and spaces exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity. Her current book in progress, Wounded Cities, is based upon geo-ethnographic research in Berlin, Bogota, Cape Town, Dublin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke. It highlights the significance of place- based memory work and ethical forms of care at multiple scales that may contribute to creating more socially just futures.
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How do artistic practices and knowledges enhance scholarly interrogations of Irish pasts and presents, and contribute to more publicly-minded ways to remember possible futures? This special issue of The Irish Rcuicw, edited and \Vritten... more
How do artistic practices and knowledges enhance scholarly interrogations of Irish pasts and presents, and contribute to more publicly-minded ways to remember possible futures? This special issue of The Irish Rcuicw, edited and \Vritten by Irish Studies scholars, artists and cultural geographers, builds upon recent work calling attention to the significance of place-based and embodied creative practices that imagine and perform alternative Irelands.
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Twenty years after unification, Berlin now boasts sleek corporate buildings (Figure 1), regional transportation nodes, a federal government district, a renovating historic district, gentrified inner city neighborhoods, trendy galleries,... more
Twenty years after unification, Berlin now boasts sleek corporate buildings (Figure 1), regional transportation nodes, a federal government district, a renovating historic district, gentrified inner city neighborhoods, trendy galleries, and a centralized memory district (Till, 2005). Advertising campaigns promoting the city have used tours, viewing platforms, and “wrapped” building sites with plastic facades to depict the city to come. City marketing and tourism strategies have been successful in making the “new” city a spectacle, even after the boom of post-unification construction.
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In this collection, several authors – ranging from early career to well established academics – consider the role of women and the female voice in academia. This compilation developed from a conference session organised by the Supporting... more
In this collection, several authors – ranging from early career to well established academics – consider the role of women and the female voice in academia. This compilation developed from a conference session organised by the Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG) Ireland group, at the Conference of Irish Geographers in University College Cork (UCC) in 2017. In the first piece, Ahern and Mc Ardle consider why this discussion is necessary at all, ruminating on examples from both within and outside of academia. Till then brings in her experience working in Ireland, the US and beyond, and reflects on the importance of including all voices, and challenges scholars to end gender discrimination in Ireland. Manzo then reflects on how female work in academia, similar to community organising, can be considered invisible, devalued labour (Daniels, 1987). Yet she focuses on the positives of this, outlining the women-centred community organising model, the social capital that is involved, and th...
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More than a decade after the fall of apartheid, Cape Town is a city marked by the construction cranes and scaffolding of urban development. Reimagining itself as new, Cape Town appears eager to submerge remnants of its colonial and... more
More than a decade after the fall of apartheid, Cape Town is a city marked by the construction cranes and scaffolding of urban development. Reimagining itself as new, Cape Town appears eager to submerge remnants of its colonial and apartheid pasts behind new facades and building sites. Sometimes the spirit of reconciliation is etched into the city’s new architecture: Mandela-Rhodes Place, a complex of chic innercity hotels and restaurants, names both the struggleicon Nelson Mandela and the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. Other times, gentrification overwrites histories of violence. In Green Point, an innercity precinct where cemeteries for slaves and members of the colonial underclass once existed, a thriving gay and lesbian night scene, boutique designer stores and world-class restaurants seem to leave little room for such memories of shame and exclusion. Instead, a new 2010 World Cup football stadium rises up in the midst of the neighbourhood, as another urban icon that will perform a cosmopolitan new South African nation on the world stage.
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Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re) building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic facades to depict future urban... more
Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re) building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic facades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine. Although these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first 15 years of Berlin’s post-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center might replace this former GDR parliamentary building. Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Kobberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms that led down into those sites. Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn It One More Time (2006–2008), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the division.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Ethics, Applied Ethics, and 15 morePlace Attachment, Place and Identity, History and Memory, Politics, Memory Studies, Social and Collective Memory, Cultural Memory, Collective Memory, Public Memory, Forgetting, Place, Chilean Social and Cultural History, Scholarship, Holocuast Studies, and Erdkunde
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So-called temporary uses of urban space, including 'pop ups' or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term 'solutions' to the 'problem' of vacancy. Yet... more
So-called temporary uses of urban space, including 'pop ups' or meanwhile spaces, have recently attracted much attention by urban professionals as providing short-term 'solutions' to the 'problem' of vacancy. Yet the ways in which these urban innovations are conceived, studied and evaluated continue to reify a capitalist framework of development and conceptual understanding of the city that valorises exchange value and permanence. The result is that little empirical research exists about smaller projects that offer the city and its residents many non-monetary benefits. In this article, we argue that evaluating urban space according to the dichotomy of permanent or temporary land use is problematic: it misses the fluidity and multiple rhythms of how places are made and spaces experienced that are inherent to the regular life of any city. Rather than temporary use, we use the concept of 'interim space' to consider projects that may be responsive to loca...
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The cultural production These Rooms challenged traditional nationalistic commemorations of war and rebellion during the ‘Decade of the Centenaries’. Created by the Dublin-based ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre, and funded by the... more
The cultural production These Rooms challenged traditional nationalistic commemorations of war and rebellion during the ‘Decade of the Centenaries’. Created by the Dublin-based ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre, and funded by the Irish and UK governments, this series of theatre/dance performances, installations and public outreach projects in unconventional urban venues ran from 2016 to 2019 in Dublin, London and Liverpool, cities with mixed British and Irish populations. Fragmentary, embodied stories about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin communicated the perspectives of working-class Irish civilian women and confused young British soldiers through intimate domestic encounters that productively disrupted heroic narratives. Audiences were instead invited to create temporary communities of encounter and ‘unlearn’ dominant concepts supporting colonial, imperial and national spaces‐times. As a critical agonistic artistic intervention, These Rooms offered more inclusive ‘potent...
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15 Ethnography and Participant Observation PAUL ATKINSON MARTYN HAMMERSLEY ETHNOGRAPHIC methods, relying substantially or partly on "participant observation ...
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In this edited conversation, Anu Productions’ and CoisCéim Dance Theatre’s artistic directors, David Bolger, Owen Boss and Louise Lowe, reflect upon their past projects, creative practices, and reasons for working together in a... more
In this edited conversation, Anu Productions’ and CoisCéim Dance Theatre’s artistic directors, David Bolger, Owen Boss and Louise Lowe, reflect upon their past projects, creative practices, and reasons for working together in a conversation with the cultural geographer Karen E. Till. The artistic directors further describe their responses to the testimonies of the 38 women whose stories inspired THESE ROOMS, and their motivation for trying to create a visceral means for future audience members to understand what it must have felt like to have an ‘uninvited rebellion’ crashing into their homes. At the time of this conversation – seven-and-a-half months before the launch of the 2016 performance in Dublin – the artists discuss the possibilities and challenges of collaboration when they didn’t have a performance venue. Their artistic journey, a kind of ‘collective dreaming’, was built upon mutual trust that enabled the artists to move between visual, theatre and dance artistic forms, while maintaining an ethical impetus to bear witness to the civilian murders of North King Street.
Booklet edited and designed by Karen E. Till (2017).
Booklet edited and designed by Karen E. Till (2017).
Waiting 'For the City to Remember': Archive and Repertoire in ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre's 'These Rooms' Karen Till, Department of Geography, Maynooth University. Email: karen.till@mu.ie The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin... more
Waiting 'For the City to Remember': Archive and Repertoire in ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre's 'These Rooms'
Karen Till, Department of Geography, Maynooth University. Email: karen.till@mu.ie
The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin was officially remembered for the heroic feats and martrydom of the men responsible for declaring Irish independence from British rule. Among the artistic projects that challenged this ‘canon of history’ was ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre’s 'These Rooms' (http://theserooms.ie). This intimate performance was inspired by the largely forgotten history of the murder of 16 civilian men and boys by British soldiers during the Easter Rising. It sought to ‘reconsider how Irish acts of rebellion have shifted cultural thinking at home and abroad’ (ANU, 2015) through the body memory of 38 ordinary Dublin women, as set in multiples pasts and presents. Rather than equate the historical as 'traumatic' or use abject female bodies to depict violence, 'These Rooms' called attention to the inability of a city to remember its own inhabitants amidst the forgetful excesses of national commemoration and neoliberalism. Audience members moved through experiential environments, and watched and participated in performances of this ‘retelling’ of events near the historical location of the violence. By (re)animating the possible ways civilians dealt with (and ignored) the legacies of colonial violence in their homes and the city in 1916, 1966 and 2016, the artists created scenarios that moved between the material objectivity of the archive and the body memory of the repertoire (Taylor 2003) so as to invite audiences to bear witness to violence, grief and mourning in a (post)colonial wounded city.
Keywords: memory, archive, Dublin, art and geography
Karen Till, Department of Geography, Maynooth University. Email: karen.till@mu.ie
The 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin was officially remembered for the heroic feats and martrydom of the men responsible for declaring Irish independence from British rule. Among the artistic projects that challenged this ‘canon of history’ was ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre’s 'These Rooms' (http://theserooms.ie). This intimate performance was inspired by the largely forgotten history of the murder of 16 civilian men and boys by British soldiers during the Easter Rising. It sought to ‘reconsider how Irish acts of rebellion have shifted cultural thinking at home and abroad’ (ANU, 2015) through the body memory of 38 ordinary Dublin women, as set in multiples pasts and presents. Rather than equate the historical as 'traumatic' or use abject female bodies to depict violence, 'These Rooms' called attention to the inability of a city to remember its own inhabitants amidst the forgetful excesses of national commemoration and neoliberalism. Audience members moved through experiential environments, and watched and participated in performances of this ‘retelling’ of events near the historical location of the violence. By (re)animating the possible ways civilians dealt with (and ignored) the legacies of colonial violence in their homes and the city in 1916, 1966 and 2016, the artists created scenarios that moved between the material objectivity of the archive and the body memory of the repertoire (Taylor 2003) so as to invite audiences to bear witness to violence, grief and mourning in a (post)colonial wounded city.
Keywords: memory, archive, Dublin, art and geography
An innovative exploration of German memory, national identity, and modernity Four locations frame The New Berlin: the Topography of Terror, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, and Sachsenhausen Concentration... more
An innovative exploration of German memory, national identity, and modernity
Four locations frame The New Berlin: the Topography of Terror, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum. Through field notes, interviews, archival texts, personal narratives, public art, maps, images, and other sources, Karen Till describes how these places and spaces exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity.
The New Berlin is an insightful and articulate study on the remaking of Berlin as a microcosm of debates about memory at this moment in history.
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Marita Sturken, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California
Four locations frame The New Berlin: the Topography of Terror, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum. Through field notes, interviews, archival texts, personal narratives, public art, maps, images, and other sources, Karen Till describes how these places and spaces exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity.
The New Berlin is an insightful and articulate study on the remaking of Berlin as a microcosm of debates about memory at this moment in history.
—
Marita Sturken, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California
... Deb Sim, head curator of the Armory and Experiential Art Galleries, has also been an experienced guide, curator, friend, and mentor in this process; her creative genius along with her assistant Morgan Sayers, has lead to two... more
... Deb Sim, head curator of the Armory and Experiential Art Galleries, has also been an experienced guide, curator, friend, and mentor in this process; her creative genius along with her assistant Morgan Sayers, has lead to two exceptional and innova-tive exhibitions for our ...
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l 4 Ethnography and participant observation Sara Delamont Down the canyon, smoke from meal lires drifted through the cedar and mesquite trees, and if I ...
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In this dissertation, I attempt to investigate the significance of place to the construction of collective memory and identity. To do so, I examine the histories and geographies of two concrete places in (West) Berlin before and after... more
In this dissertation, I attempt to investigate the significance of place to the construction of collective memory and identity. To do so, I examine the histories and geographies of two concrete places in (West) Berlin before and after unification. The first is ...
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'In this short essay, I outline three reasons to invest in shared artistic labour: its collaborative discovery in multiple fields, its creative practices of social and ecological sustainability, and its educational outreach to a range of... more
'In this short essay, I outline three reasons to invest in shared artistic labour: its collaborative discovery in multiple fields, its creative practices of social and ecological sustainability, and its educational outreach to a range of publics.' Karen Till, Field Findings, 2012, p. 23.