Community Memory Mapping as a Visual Ethnography of Post-War Northeast England

Abstract

This chapter develops around a community mapping methodology and its fieldwork. Community-centred visualisations, growing out of emplaced stories and affects, may be able to channel otherwise elusive imaginaries and the ephemeral mnemonic spaces encountered in fieldwork. For Ricoeur, telling stories can give shape to ephemeral, intangible elements of everyday life. What of the intangible elements of everyday life and storytelling that are remembered collectively and individually, but do not necessarily leave a physical trace? This chapter engages with one such visualisation, a memory-map of the village of Kibblesworth in northeast England, populated with the present and past imaginings of a community of people and of an open-air museum. The museum embodies the imagination of place and of local/non-local memory construction, as it prepares to ‘reassemble’ and exhibit a terrace of prefabricated concrete houses removed from Kibblesworth in the new 1950s town.