Mapping Lives/Telling Stories: The Spatial Politics of Intergenerational Memory and Hope in Beirut

Описание

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David J. Marshall, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona

Lynn Staeheli, Professor, School of Geography and Development, University of Arizona

University of Arizona's MENAS Colloquium Series

Filmed by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies
cmes.arizona.edu
April 22, 2016

In societies emerging from prolonged conflict and division, efforts to rebuild the physical infrastructure of damaged cities takes place in tandem with efforts to repair the social fabric of damaged lives and communities. Together these rebuilding efforts involve the creation of new ways of living and living together. Though often the purview of urban developers and post-conflict development experts, these processes are politically and emotionally fraught. Young people, who are typically the target of such social rebuilding efforts, may feel more like the recipients of a prefigured future rather than active participants shaping the direction of their country or city. Moreover, although they may be taught about the importance of dialogue, reconciliation, and unity, the everyday physical surroundings that young people inhabit may still bear the traces of violence and on-going division. How do people coming of age in a city scarred by war experience the city, and how do they make sense of the entangled temporalities of past violence and future hope embedded in an urban landscape? Moreover, how might people imagine and create new forms of belonging and ways of living in the city that strive toward alternative futures constructed in the present? In seeking to understand how young people and others make sense of these temporal urban entanglements and how they experience life in a post-conflict city, this presentation draws upon a community-based, inter-generational digital storytelling and mapping project conducted with young people in Beirut, Lebanon.