Research project Monuments’ Democratic Potential

Creating Sites for Participation, Social Justice & Critical Discourse.

Chess Players at Françoise Schein’s The Vienna Banquet of Human Rights and its Guardians, Vienna, Austria

This project investigates how monuments are used to express and implement key democratic values such as participation, social justice and critical discourse, and how do people respond to these manifestations in public space.

Project description

Monument protests dominate media and academic attention. Thereby, an important development within monument making remains understudied: increasingly, artists and commissioners trust monuments to function as tools to strengthen democracy. I have identified three strategies characteristic for this development:

Monuments are used to invite citizens’ participation by providing more inclusive themes and interactive designs;
Monuments are used to demand social justice; and
Monuments are used to establish sites of contestation and critical discourse.

These strategies make up the selection criteria for three case studies from Austria, the US and Germany. Their analysis frames the planned monograph’s three main chapters. Performativity in combination with audience reception studies allows me to examine how far the intentions of the monument makers coincide with how people behave at and use these markers in public space. The comparative discussion of the cases provides more general conclusions about these strategies’ strengths and weaknesses. More broadly, the monograph gives insights on monuments’ potential to renegotiate and implement three core democratic values – participation, social justice and critical discourse. This will make a significant contribution to the global discourse among academics, artists, commissioners and policy makers on monuments’ relevance and functions in 21st-century democracies.

Research subjects

Monuments, Democracy, Public Space, The Equal Justice Initiative, Deine Stele, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Das Zentrum für politische Schönheit, Bryan Stevenson, Françoise Schein, The Vienna Banquet of Human Rights and its Guardians.

Project members

Project managers

Tanja Schult

Publications

Final report of the project at the funder Riksbankens Jubileumsfond's webpage

News

2024-10-07

Department of Culture and Aesthetics

A research journey on democratic monuments during the US election campaign

In October and November, art historian Tanja Schult will visit several cities in the United States as part of her research on contemporary monuments. Follow her journey in her newly launched blog. Tanja Schult is assiociate professor and senior lecturer of Art history at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory, on how monuments renegotiate questions of identity and participation, and how art’s efficacy can be captured through audience reception. She is now working on a project that investigates how monuments are used to express and implement key democratic values such as participation, social justice and critical discourse, and how do people respond to these manifestations in public space. During her trip to the United States, she will present her research at various universities such as CUNY and Berkeley and conduct research, the latter in particular at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which Schult has already written about. For example on the Liminalities website: Reshaping American Identity The lecture tour and fieldwork are being carried out as part of the research project The Democratic Potential of Monuments, which is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.