1st Edition
Diversity of Belonging in Europe Public Spaces, Contested Places, Cultural Encounters
Diversity of Belonging in Europe analyzes conflicting notions of identity and
belonging in contemporary Europe. Addressing the creation, negotiation, and (re)
use of diverse spaces and places of belonging, the book examines their fascinating
complexities in the context of a changing Europe.
Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the volume examines
renegotiations of belonging played out through cultural encounters with difference
and change, in diverse public spaces and contested places. Highlighting the
interconnections between social change and culture, heritage, and memory, the
chapters analyze multilayered public spaces and the negotiations over culture and
belonging that are connected to them. Through analyses of diverse case studies, the
editors and authors draw out the significance of the participation or exclusion of
differing community, grassroots, and activist groups in such practices and discourses
of belonging in relation to the contemporary emergence of identity conflicts and
political uses of the past across Europe. They analyze the ways in which people’s
sense of belonging is connected to cultural, heritage, and memory practices
undertaken in different public spaces, including museums, cultural and community
centres, city monuments and built heritage, neglected urban spaces, and online fora.
Diversity of Belonging in Europe provides a valuable contribution to the
existing bodies of work on identities, migration, public space, memory, and
heritage. The book will be of interest to scholars and students with an interest in
contested belonging, public spaces, and the role of culture and heritage.
Susannah Eckersley is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK, an
Associated Research Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History
(ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany, and the Project Leader of en/counter/points – a
collaborative European research project on public spaces and belonging funded
by HERA. Her expertise is in memory, museums, difficult heritage, migration,
identities, and belonging.
Claske Vos is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of
European Studies at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. Her current work focuses on the intersection of EU funding, cultural
activism, and enlargement. Her expertise is in European cultural policy, cultural
heritage, Southeast Europe, and European identity formation.
List of figures vii
List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
SUSANNAH ECKERSLEY AND CLASKE VOS
PART I
Redefining and negotiating public spaces of belonging 13
Introduction to Part I: Redefining and negotiating public
spaces of belonging 15
CLASKE VOS AND SUSANNAH ECKERSLEY
1 Museums as a public space of belonging? Negotiating dialectics
of purpose, presentation, and participation 17
SUSANNAH ECKERSLEY
2 Negotiated belonging: Migrant religious institutions in Warsaw 41
MAŁGORZATA GŁOWACKA-GRAJPER, GRAŻYNA SZYMAŃSKA-MATUSIEWICZ,
AND JOANNA WAWRZYNIAK
3 “Deep historicization” and political and spatio-temporal
“centrism”: Layers of time and belonging in the reconstructed
city centres of Berlin and Potsdam 62
ACHIM SAUPE
4 Shaping Europeanness: the European Year of Cultural
Heritage 2018 as a new mode of governance: Between
coordinative and communicative discourses 83
CARLOTTA SCIOLDO
5 The iceberg, the stage, and the kitchen: Neglected public places
and the role of design-led interventions 100
JACOPO LEVERATTO, FRANCESCA GOTTI, AND FRANCESCA LANZ
6 Establishing a place in the European cultural space:
Grassroots cultural action and practices of self-governance
in Southeast Europe 117
CLASKE VOS
PART II
Encountering contested belongings in public places 135
Introduction to Part II: Encountering contested belongings
in public places 137
CLASKE VOS AND SUSANNAH ECKERSLEY
7 Taxonomies of pain: Museal embodiments of identity and
belonging in post-communist Romania 139
CARMEN LEVICK
8 Negotiation of belonging of built heritage: Russian and Soviet
heritage in Warsaw 159
MAŁGORZATA GŁOWACKA-GRAJPER
9 In the centre of conflict: Negotiating belonging and public
space in post-unification Berlin Mitte 177
KRISTIN MEIßNER
10 Encounters through Kahlenberg: Urban traces of
transnational right-wing action 197
DAVID FARRELL-BANKS
11 Staged claims of belonging: English museums, Brexit, and the
“Windrush Scandal” 215
HELEN MEARS
12 Redefining collective heritage, identities, and belonging:
Colonial statues in the times of Black Lives Matter 236
JOHANNA TURUNEN
Index 253
Biography
Susannah Eckersley is Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, UK, an
Associated Research Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History
(ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany, and the Project Leader of en/counter/points – a
collaborative European research project on public spaces and belonging funded
by HERA. Her expertise is in memory, museums, difficult heritage, migration,
identities, and belonging.
Claske Vos is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of
European Studies at the Humanities Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. Her current work focuses on the intersection of EU funding, cultural
activism, and enlargement. Her expertise is in European cultural policy, cultural
heritage, Southeast Europe, and European identity formation.
