This project theorizes how commemorative and memorial objects are received and understood within the broader symbolic landscapes that comprise neighbourhoods and communities.  Building on existing research on contested Confederate monuments in the USA, this paper examines a distinctive symbolic genre: political murals in Belfast.

The analysis turns on questions of audience, captured through a matched sample of “arterial” and “interior” areas spanning the city.

Our core questions engage the mixed political economy associated with the symbolic landscape:

• How do the affordances created by murals—characterized by a dynamism enabled by the removal or re-imaging of certain presentations, and around which viewers may hold multi-valent experience and expectation—relate to and shape the surrounding environments within which individual displays are produced and consumed?
• Do those messages differ based on an expectation that they will be viewed by local vs. external (especially tourist) audiences, and if so, how?

Professor David Cunningham

David Cunningham (he/him) is Professor and past Chair of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, and a Visiting Scholar at the Mitchell Institute.  Author of the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK, David is currently the Chair-Elect of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements.

Building on related prior public-facing work in the U.S. with the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Mississippi Truth Project, he also currently serves on the St. Louis Reparations Commission and as an instructor and board member for Washington University’s Prison Education Project.

Currently, his research centres on how legacies of historical racialized violence shape ongoing inequalities and divisions.  Those interests speak as well to the dynamics that surround contested sites of public memory, including those involving Confederate monuments in the US South and political murals in Belfast, the topic of this workshop paper.

Asha Marie Larson-Baldwin

Asha Marie Larson-Baldwin (she/her) is a PhD student in Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis.  She is a recent graduate of the Public History Masters Degree Programme at Queen’s University Belfast where she was a 2023 George J. Mitchell Scholar.  Her research interests include collective memory, symbolic landscapes, and community studies.