Thursday 2 November 2023 | Wageningen Geography Lecture

Over the past two decades, digital technologies have become increasingly central to the work of institutions of difficult heritage, as they seek to maintain and extend the access of diverse publics to sites and memories of the traumatic past. The digitalisation of difficult heritage is particularly prominent among memorials and museums of the Holocaust, and recent work from across the social sciences has drawn attention to the pedagogical possibilities but also ambivalent implications of this broad digital turn. This lecture introduces two projects that provide a geographical perspective on these debates. The first focuses on the phenomenon of virtual tours to sites such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and the curious spatial logic whereby digital platforms promise an immersive experience of sites whose heritage significance is based precisely on their tangible materialities. The second considers the use of artificial intelligence to create (the impression of) interactive conversations with Holocaust survivors, and the potential transformation in the meaning of witness testimony that this development heralds; a transformation conceptualised here as a shift in emphasis from proximity to communality.

Dr. Richard Carter-White is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University. His research sits at the intersection of cultural and political geography, and provides a geographical perspective on structures, spaces, representations and experiences of violence (both political and environmental). He is currently engaged in projects investigating the spatialities of the concentration and refugee camp, post-disaster communities and landscapes in Japan, and the digital geographies of difficult heritage.