Scaling tragedy: Memorialization and globalization at the World Trade Center site

My dissertation examines the ways in which practices of memorialization, practices intended to honor, mourn, and reflect upon tragedy, create and materially mark histories, or enduring narratives, using memorializations of September 11th at the World Trade Center (WTC) site as my case study. In particular, I investigated how emerging histories represented September 11th as belonging to particular groups, facilitating practices of inclusion and exclusion. I used ethnographic methods to document vernacular and official practices of memorialization. This included participant-observation, digital photography, and interviews with visitors at the WTC site, and off-site fieldwork and interviews with Lower Manhattan residents, family members of victims, architects, and museum curators. Vernacular and official practices dynamically intersected to create multiple narratives of September 11 th. Specifically, narratives emerged out of groups\u27, individuals\u27, and institutions\u27 negotiations over memorials\u27 material and discursive qualities. Narratives on vernacular forms---homemade memorials at the WTC site created by visitors from around the world, testimonies during rebuilding hearings, and family members\u27 private memorializations---marked multiple and contradictory histories of September 11th. They voiced senses of sadness and loss within and across national boundaries, alongside assertions of national power. Narratives on official forms---the site\u27s viewing fence, designs for a future site, and September 11th museum exhibits---marked more monolithic and therefore exclusionary histories. They echoed themes of national strength but marginalized senses of loss and vulnerability, and representations of supranational components of the events. Further, groups and institutions strategically employed categories of \u27memory\u27 and \u27history\u27 to naturalize narratives that represented September 11th as \u27national,\u27 and marginalize narratives that represented the events over a supranational scale. My research shows that practices of memorialization and history-making facilitate senses of belonging to groups that cohere within and beyond national borders, and that questions of scale are often integral to politics of memorialization. Further, it shows that practices of memorialization and history-making inform one another, and suggests that these intersections are integral to the ways in which people use knowledge of past events in the present