Curating Difficult Knowledge : Violent Pasts in Public Places

Much of the literature on post-violent contexts addresses problems of transitional justice, memory studies, and post-conflict reconciliation. This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, situating itself creatively amidst these discussions but building upon the literatures of museum and heritage studies. The contributors (themselves practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics) draw from a broad range of geographical and theoretical material, and explore new ways of bearing witness vis-a-vis curatorial practice, heritage work and memorializing the past, to examine the challenges and limitations of such endeavors.

ERICA LEHRER is Assistant Professor in History and Anthropology-Sociology at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also holds the Canada Research chair in Post-Conflict Studies. She is author of Revisiting Jewish Poland: Heritage, Memory, Reconciliation (2012), and has undertaken experimental curatorial work on Jewish heritage and memory in contemporary Poland. CYNTHIA E. MILTONis Canada Research Chair in Latin American History and Associate Professor in the Departement d'histoire at the Universite de Montreal, Canada. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007), editor of The Arts of Truth-telling in Post-Shining Path Peru, and co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005). MONICA EILEEN PATTERSON is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is the author of numerous publications, and co-editor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (2011).