As the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic approaches, it might be time to consider how our modern age wants to remember this plague.
City cemeteries are fast running out of space, so researchers surveyed Australians and found many were quite open to the alternatives to traditional burials.
Artwork ‘Melly Shum Hates Her Job’ by Ken Lum hangs in the Witte de Withstraat district in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, shown May 2008.
(Ken Lum/Wikimedia Commons)
A Rotterdam art centre removed its colonial-era name and is renaming itself ‘The Kunstinstituut Melly,’ to honour the city’s 30-year love affair with Ken Lum’s iconic work.
Artist Joi T. Arcand explains ‘Never Surrender,’ ‘translates a …1980s Canadian pop song into the Cree language and recontextualiz[es] the lyrics as an anthem of Indigenous sovereignty.’ Here, the image layered over a photo of a Winnipeg sidewalk.
(Noor)
Both the COVID-19 pandemic and urgent debates around public heritage and monuments shape how Nuit Blanche Toronto is seeking to engage artists and viewers in remapping cities.
Possible names for the new federal electorate in Victoria? (From left) Joan Kirner, Susan Ryan and Zelda D'Aprano.
AAP
The Australian Electoral Commission is taking public submissions on the name for a new federal electorate in Victoria. Prominent women like Susan Ryan and Margaret Tucker deserve consideration.
Sean Donahue, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
A global pandemic might be at the forefront of everyone’s minds. But we can’t assume that future threats will get the attention they deserve from people living in an information-saturated world.
A piper plays ‘Amazing Grace’ as local residents look on during a local vigil in Wentworth, N.S., after the worst mass shooting in Canada.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Liam Hennessey
Virtual music vigils after the Nova Scotia shootings draw on a long tradition of Atlantic Canadian disaster songs and ‘broadside ballads’ to mourn in a time of social distancing.
Funeral homes, crematoria and morgues face many challenges in the months ahead as the coronavirus death toll rises.
Black Saturday firefighters battling flames in Victoria. When we laud fire fighters as heroes, we fail to acknowledge the ongoing impact of the fires.
AAP Image/Andrew Brownbill
In commemorating firefighters as heroes, we can fall into the danger of overstating their ability to control fires, absolving ourselves of responsibility.
A statuette of a proposed memorial that has yet to find full funding.
Memorial 2007
Despite the millions used in the transatlantic slave trade and Britain benefitting from their forced labour, a national memorial is proving difficult.
A damaged Confederate statue lies on a pallet in a warehouse in Durham, N.C. on Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2017, after protesters yanked it off its pedestal in front of a government building.
AP Photo/Allen Breed
Where do old Confederate statues go when they die? The former Soviet bloc countries could teach the US something about dealing with monuments from a painful past.
Some say Till’s body was dumped from the Old Black Bayou Bridge in Glendora, Mississippi. Others dispute this detail.
cmh2315fl/flickr
Scholars continue to debate what, exactly, happened to Emmett Till the morning of his murder. But that hasn’t stopped a poor Mississippi community from trying to profit off one version of the story.
A scholar takes a pilgrimage of the Western Front to try to comprehend the loss of lives of the First World War. Here British soldiers in a battlefield trench, c. 1915-1918.
Shutterstock
From the Swiss border to the English channel, a scholar describes his pilgrimage of the Western Front as a tribute to fallen soldiers and to learn more about the devastating loss of life.
A man holds a sign at a memorial remembering the victims of the July 22, 2018 shooting in Toronto.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinch
Toronto is still grappling with the fallout from two mass casualty events – April’s van attack and a mass shooting in July. A month after the shooting, how is Toronto moving forward?
Names of lynching victims at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala.
AP/Brynn Anderson
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice helps demonstrate that the lynching of black people was not the fault of victims. But telling this history risks re-traumatizing the black community.
Six memorial candles are lit during a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Sharkey Theater on board Naval Station Pearl Harbor.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class James E. Foehl