Thursday 23 February 18:00 - 21:00

Wash Houses, Aldgate Campus, London Metropolitan University
Old Castle Street
London
E1 7NT

Tickets Unavailable
  • 🎉
  • 🍻

‘She loved this place’: memorial benches as life writing and life siting

Family & Education

Part of inaugural professorial lectures from the staff at School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University.

Inaugural professorial lecture:

Anne Karpf - ‘She loved this place’: memorial benches as life writing and life siting

The pandemic focused collective attention not only on death but also, as in the case of the national covid memorial wall, the ways in which it is publicly marked. Despite the proliferation of online spaces for memorialising a person who has died, there is a growing demand for physical commemorations, as evidenced by the waiting-lists for memorial benches in sought-after public spots.

This lecture draws together some of my longstanding research interests, including how public space can enable or disable and the memorialisation of lives and deaths. In it I will explore some reasons for the increasing popularity of the memorial bench and see it as a material way of marking a life in a digital age, and part of the turn towards the body, particularly the increasing interest in embodiment. I will consider it also as an example of topophilia, the bonds that develop between people and places. Memorial benches are a reminder of the ways in which public spaces are stitched into daily routines, of the quiet value and meaning attached to local public squares, parks and beaches, increasingly encroached upon by privatisation.

While memorial benches have been studied as an example of memory practices, they have been curiously neglected as an example of life writing. So I will also reflect on benches as a ‘living obituary’, a celebration of seemingly undistinguished lives, a form of self-publishing and a ‘remediation’ of one person’s life by another. Examining the language of inscriptions on plaques, from the formulaic to the subversive, as a mode of bringing the private into the public and for its performative aspects, I will consider memorial benches as relational narratives – cryptic but often emotionally-charged biographies linking self and other.

Anne Karpf is Professor of Life Writing and Culture in AAD. A sociologist and regular broadcaster, she is also an award-winning journalist and writer. Her five books of nonfiction, including The Human Voice, How to Age and, most recently How Women Can Save the Planet, have been translated into 13 languages. Her broad research interests include Holocaust studies, ageing, gender, the human voice, the politics of care, the climate crisis and public space. She set up and co-organises the university’s Centre for Life Writing and Oral History (CLiOH).

18:00: Registration Opens

18:30: Lecture begins

19:30: Drinks Reception

This event will be taking place in person only in Wash Houses, Aldgate campus.

If you are London Met staff or student, please use your London Met email address to register.

Please contact the Research and Postgraduate Office if you have any questions about this or any of our other events - [email protected].

To receive notifications of future events, please follow the Research and Postgraduate Office on Eventbrite.

For internal use only XX011 XX055 XX050 XX051 XX073

Hide Comments Comments

You must login before you can post a comment.