Restorative Geographies: Remembering as Collective Action in the 21st Century

Communities across the globe are experiencing environmental devastations, political violence and upheaval, mass displacement and migration, ongoing efforts of colonial dispossession and extraction, racism, and erasure. In times of crisis in the 21st Century, memory work becomes a form of public health and reshapes geography. Communities build memorials, document oral histories, preserve landscapes, occupy threatened places, perform rituals, create archives, plant gardens, stage performances, organize mutual aid, and tell stories that insist on remembrance. These acts do more than commemorate experiences, they create unique geographies for collective survival, belonging, accountability, restoration, resistance, and joy.

As in Pile & Keith’s work Geographies of Resistance, we acknowledge geography as illustrative of power relationships and that geographic resistance efforts “occupy, deploy, and create alternative spatialities from those defined through oppression and exploitation.” These locations of resistance are informed, created, and sustained by memory work. Restorative Geographics begins with the premise that memory is not an act of preservation, but one of resistance and survival. Memory work thus shapes our physical and social geographies. 

This volume is interested in memory work and geography construction that challenge/resist during times of crisis, asking the critical question: What does memory-making and geography construction make possible in moments marked by political polarization, deliberate distortions of historical records, and growing inequities? Restorative Geographies moves beyond just identification of locations of resistance, but details the underlying nature of memory in empowering people and communities.

Within this frame, we invite scholars, artists, practitioners, activists, and community collaborators to examine memory-making as a practice of (re)constructing geography, serving as both collective resistance and care. We seek contributions that understand memory and geography not as static records, but as an ongoing public practice shaped by relationships between people and places.