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Stone Bodies in the City: (Un)mapping Monuments, Memory and Belonging in Ottawa

Monuments are often dismissed as materializing dominant narratives of history and belonging
and becoming a naturalized aspect of the built environment. In this project I engage with monu-
ments as ‘stone bodies’ to explore their place--making and cultural memory generating proper-
ties. This inquiry asks: in what ways do monuments allow and disallow possibilities for engaging
with cultural memory? Guided by Sherene Razack’s concept of ‘unmapping’ this research will in-
volve a mapping and a critical discourse analysis of the monuments in Ottawa. The aim is to unveil,
through a spatialisation of monuments and biographies of monuments’ dynamic lives, how monu-
ments contribute to urban spaces as palimpsests of cultural memory and identity. This unmapping
pays particular attention to the ways in which monuments conceal or reveal raced and gendered
power dynamics.

This is an abstract of my proposed disseration research.

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