On 6-7 November 2020, Kyushu University hosted an international conference devoted to the operation and conceptualization of contested memorial spaces from throughout the Asia-Pacific. Building upon two earlier events, “Borders of Memory” in December 2016, and “Heritage, conflicted sites and bordered memories in Asia” in July 2020, this inter-disciplinary event brought insights from recent work on the politics of heritage and the social construction of territorial disputes into dialogue.

The aims of the event were threefold:

·       To consider how sites of memory operate across political scales, from the intensely local to the national, international, and global;
·       To understand how these spaces provide a point of contact at which expressions of collective memory and competing political claims meet;
·       To reflect on whether such sites may be transformed from places of memorial contestation into spaces able to accommodate political difference.

The breadth of the exciting work on display drew attention to the tensions inherent in these contested sites as spaces where national identity is both affirmed and contested.

See below for further details and recordings of the conference.

Organized by: Kyushu University Border Studies

Supported by: Asia Week;
Kyushu University Sustainable Development Goals;
British Association of Japanese Studies

With the Cooperation of: NIHU Area Studies Project for Northeast Asia (NoA-SRC);
JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research “Society and representations of 'territory' in Northeast Asia” [Project No. 20H01460]