Eleri Connick MA

PhD candidate

Area(s) of interest: Colonialism & Postcolonialism, Heritage Studies, Memory Studies, Migration History & Diaspora

Cohort/Start PhD: 2022-2023

The Diaspora as Cultural Creative Spaces

University of Amsterdam
Promotor(es): Prof. Dr. Ihab Saloul, Prof. Dr. James Symonds
Start: September 2022

Situated in memory and cultural analysis studies, my project is a comparative diasporic study exploring whether diasporas can act as cultural creative spaces to remember, construct, and define notions of identity and heritage. More specifically, the focus will be on Middle Eastern diasporas who remain in the Middle East region. The research seeks to challenge the perception that diasporic creative cultural spaces are places seeped in nostalgic discourse in the negative sense. It will explore how these creative cultural spaces influence reflections on heritage, performativity of identity and how the wider diasporic community engage with their heritage. In doing so, this project seeks to understand how memories of violence in the past intertwine with conceptions of identity and heritage in the present. Thus, exploring the hypothesis of diasporic cultural creative spaces as spaces to both empower and preserve heritage under threat. The research will be situated within several academic fields: memory, heritage, (particularly decolonising heritage), and how diaspora can be used as an analytical framework.