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Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly, has been invited by the Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA, to give a lecture. The talk is titled "Taking Pierre Nora to the Bombsite: Memory, Death and Capital."

Pierre Nora has argued that: ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’. For Nora, industrialisation and capitalist acceleration were the destroyers of traditional societal structures. Memory industries emerged as methods by which societies could then imagine continuity and identity in response to social dislocation. This talk takes Pierre Nora, and other scholars of memory’s political economy, to the terrorist bombsite. Building upon their historical sociologies of memorialisation, and using her fieldwork from the reconstruction efforts which followed the 9/11 attacks and European bombings, I explore the sublimation of the memorial (and the dead human) to economic agendas and broader rationales of ‘regeneration’ and urban renewal. In post-terrorist reconstruction, the human subject is profoundly displaced by governance which triages economic injury and blight. Economy thereby emerges as the terrain upon which counterterrorism is fought.

The lecture takes place on Thursday April 6th, for more information, please see: http://humanities.uconn.edu/2017/03/25/thursday-april-6-talk-by-charlotte-heath-kelly/