How do we understand the relationship between memory and place in the context of Extended Reality (XR) migration museum exhibitions? The study combines a global mapping of XR within migration museums, a user analysis of Cologne’s virtual migration museum, and practice-led research with the UK Migration Museum to argue that XR places in Web 2.0 constitute a multiplication of memory’s significant localities. These include a migration memory’s place of beginning (the location of a migrant experience), the place of production (where the memory is transformed into representation) and the place of consumption (where the mediated memory is engaged with, looked at, heard). Mnemonic labour involving digital frictions at each of these sites constitutes a form of multiple place-making with complex feelings, meanings, and (dis)connections. This points to an innovative approach to understanding and curating XR experiences with museums that recognises the significance of the labour of place.
Scholarship on the ideological struggles of the early twentieth century has always inspired passionate engagement and sometimes heated polemics. In recent years, historiography on the Spanish Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship has been marked not only by a surge in productive new research but also by some especially vigorous disputes. One of the most prominent contributions to recent literature on twentieth-century Spain is Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: Harper Press, 2012), which has sought to place Spain's specific history in the broader context of the European experience of both dictatorship and genocide and to document fully for the first time the Franco dictatorship's policies of mass imprisonment, enslavement and extermination of its opponents during and after the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9. A recent review essay in the Journal of Contemporary History by Chris Ealham addressed these issues in a vigorous critique of the work of some of the historians who are critical of Preston's account. 1 Given the strength of Ealham's critique, the Review Editors have thought it right to give these historians -Gerald Blaney, Fernando del Rey, Roberto Villa, and Manuel Á lvarez Tardı´o -the right of reply. We have asked them to use Preston's book as a point of departure for thinking about the state of historiography on Spain's contemporary history in the context of European contemporary history, while at the same time trying to move discussion beyond polemical exchange. With this aim in mind, an additional contribution to the forum by Cathie Carmichael, a historian of the twentieth-century Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean with a special interest in the history of genocide, discusses Preston's work from a more comparative perspective, considering how the unique aspects of Spain's experience can be reconciled with its deep implication in what seemed to many observers a European-wide ideological war.
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