At locations across the globe, people are creating impromptu spaces to memorialize and celebrate events. From the peace walls of Belfast to the memorials left after 9/11 in New York City, participants are writing on walls, leaving notes, and placing mementos on chain-link fences. While these spaces are outside of any officially sanctioned monument, they serve as a way for people to participate in memory-making activities. Paris is a city where memory-making takes places in public cemeteries (in particular, at the grave sites of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde, which are literally covered in mementos) and on bridges (where lovers cover the chain-link fences with locks engraved with their names), the location where Princess Diana's fatal car crash occurred is of particular interest because of its international participation and resilience. While the immediate, overwhelming sense of mourning in 1997 was enormous, there are still participants who make pilgrimages to the site and participate in the space today, inscribing the space with writings in various languages, colors, and textures. Composing on the concrete slabs that surround the bridge above the tunnel where the crash occurred, these participants write of her loss, their shared grief, and their recovery. Examining this space in particular, we can discuss the writings of these participants, the spaces they inhabit, and the need for preserving and curating their participation.

1. Liza Potts
Senior Researcher, WIDE Research
Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities
http://www.lizapotts.org
lpotts@msu.edu
@LizaPotts
Spaces of/as Participatory Memory

2. Participatory Memory Project
When Participatory Culture alters the
conversation in Collective Memory
Studying Public Memory-Making
 Physical and Digital Spaces
 Celebrations and Mourning
Shifts in visibility, agency, and effort
 Hierarchies and Networks
 Officials and Participants

3. Extending Collective Memory
“In a sense, the act of bearing witness
made a community out of all those who
witnessed the atrocities, regardless of
their reasons for being there.”
- Barbie Zelizer in Remembering to Forget: The Holocaust
Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. 1998, p. 134.

4. From Traditional Museums

5. Who Decides What We Remember?
Memorials are “a species of pedagogy”
that “seeks to instruct posterity about
the past and, in doing so, necessarily
reaches a decision about what is worth
recovering.”
- Charles Griswold in “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the
Washington Malll” in Critical Inquiry, Summer 1986, p. 689.

6. To Participatory Action

7. Across Time / Space

8. “We are resistant towards something
and we participate in something.”
- Henry Jenkins in “Textual Poachers, Twenty Years Later: A
Conversation between Henry Jenkins and Suzanne Scott” from
the Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
Updated 20th Anniversary Edition, Routledge 2013, p. xxii
How Participation Shifts the Questions We Ask

9. Investigating Participatory Spaces

10. …Ways of Writing Memory

11. …of Celebration

12. …and of mourning

13. Participatory Memory of Princess Di
Project Goals:
• Investigate public spaces of
memory, celebration, and
reflection
• Learn about how these spaces
communicate experience for
participants
• Consider how we might
digitize, curate, and enhance
these experiences

14. Contested Memory-Making
“Public commemoration is a form of
history-making, yet, it can also be a
contested form of remembrance in
which cultural memories slide through
and into each other, merging and then
disengaging in a narrative triangle”
- Marita Sturken in “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial” from the Visual Cultural Reader, Ed.
Mirzoeff, Routledge 1998.

16. Memory and Identity
“Memory – relating past and present – is
thus the central faculty of being in
time, through which we define
individual and collective selves”
- Jeffrey K. Olic, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy in
“Introduction” from the Collective Memory Reader, Oxford 2011.

18. Storymaking as Participation
“It is only through narrative that we
know ourselves as active entities that
operate through time”
- H. Porter Abbott in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative 2002.

20. Archiving Participation
“It follows that if considerable
precautions are to be taken to assure
the identity of a culture’s symbolic
material, it will be advisable to direct
those precautions to ensuring the
identity of its ritual.”
- Paul Connerton in How Societies
Remember, Cambridge1989/2011.

21. Considering Participatory Memory

22. Thank You
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Contact Liza
http://www.lizapotts.org/
Email: lpotts@msu.edu
Twitter: @LizaPotts