Topoi

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10053-8

Situated Affects and Place Memory

John Sutton1,2

Accepted: 4 April 2024

© The Author(s) 2024

Abstract
Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges
for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or
attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and
difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive
nature of remembering, whether it is drawing on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use
memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the
current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in
these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly
distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering.
These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with
difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek respon-
sibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions,
memories, and activities.

Keywords Situated Affectivity · Place · Memory · Distributed Cognition · Cognitive Ecology · Superposition ·
Affective Ecology · Commemoration · Aesthetics

We understand history … through both evidence 1 Resources for Constructing the Past
and affect. Memory is born from that most subjec-
tive of places: desire. Memory is love and hate; fire For creatures like us, the asymmetry of experienced time
as warmth and fire as death. Memory is suffering and grounds key features of our cognitive and affective lives.
innocence; memory is the moan and weeping, and the We are not merely influenced by past events, but also some-
sudden laughter. times take them as objects of thought, feeling, and social
Luke Stegemann, Amnesia Road: landscape, violence negotiation (Campbell 1994, 1997; Hoerl 1999; Sutton
and memory (2021), p.185. 2009a). History animates our minds and our activities in
distinctive ways, at many timescales. As they come to mind
in the dynamics of everyday cognitive and social life, we
assign certain episodes to a source in past worldly experi-
ence, others to imagination (Mahr 2023), and we often try
to make some partial sense of our present feelings, moods,
or attitudes by comparing or connecting them with past
emotions, by way of even minimal narratives or small sto-
ries (Goldie 2012; Hydén 2017; Trakas 2022; Fabry 2023).
John Sutton
[email protected] As has long been recognised in research on remembering
in many fields, these are constructive processes – selec-
1
Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, tion, abstraction, condensation, interference, consolidation,
Australia pattern-transformation, reconsolidation, generalization, and
2
Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling, more. We do not store replicas or canonical versions of past
Scotland

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 J. Sutton

events, and so must deploy resources in the present to cre- But an initial grasp on how it also applies in the domains
ate more or less stable, more or less adequate memories, of place and environmentally situated affects comes from
often on the fly and iteratively in the ongoing whirl of bodily Kukla’s study of ‘how urban dwellers and urban spaces
action and social interaction (Sutton 2009b; Michaelian make one another’. Celebrating Berlin as a ‘repurposed city’
2011; Wagoner 2017; Wagoner et al. 2019). which does not freeze and fix its (troubled) past, in which
The situated or distributed approaches to mind, memory, vestiges of the past remain visible and open to reuse, Kukla
and emotion which have transformed the cognitive sciences writes (2021: 144):
from within over the last 30–40 years flesh out this picture
by pointing to the rich, sometimes partly constitutive roles Each layer of the landscape is polysemic; it is both a
of heterogeneous non-neural resources in these processes trace of multiple pasts and a structuring feature of the
of construction. Well-practised actions, trusted people, or present. Berlin never gives the illusion of being able
familiar artifacts, for example, may transform or sculpt our to show you its authentic or univocal history. Rather
cognitive and affective lives – what we think and remember than putting its history on display, Berlin goes out of
and decide and do and feel, individually and together – both its way to let the ghosts of its past remain alive and
at a time and over time. This paper’s first focus or point of visible.
departure is the fascinating and productive recent shift in
philosophical explorations of situated affectivity in which Although Kukla is not engaging explicitly with cognitive
potentially negative or harmful effects of this cognitive and theory or ideas about situated affect, I can use this strik-
emotional openness come under intensified scrutiny, as we ing description to introduce some key claims I explore here
reject ‘the dogma of harmony’ to address ‘the dark side across domains, and which animate my treatment below of
of niche construction’ and the dangers of ‘mind invasion’ responses to places with difficult pasts. Firstly, the polysemy
(Aagaard 2021; Coninx 2023; Slaby 2016). Welcoming Kukla mentions is, in my terms, superposition in ecologi-
the new perspectives emerging within this line of work, I cal action: many meanings are layered in the same material
complicate them by applying them to domains of situated trace, and any one present place or memory may connect
affectivity that are of independent interest and significance us to many past events3. Secondly, the idea of preserving
and that form the paper’s second point of departure. I exam- or accessing an original or canonical version of the past is
ine place memory, in which (in some cases) the parts of the challenged here. As a result, thirdly, constructing something
world that may be integrated into expanded processes and in the present is an ongoing activity: remembering or nar-
systems of remembering or feeling are neighbourhoods or rating or commemorating the past is – for individuals and
regions, and the challenging problems of evaluating modes communities alike – an achievement, and can be done well
of engagement with difficult histories. or badly, more or less responsibly.
The present resources which participate in the ongoing In the connectionist networks employing distributed
construction of memories and feelings, often actively and representation which significantly loosened the grip of
iteratively at various timescales and levels, notably include classical cognitivism in the 1980s, traces are ‘stored’ only
‘traces’ of past events. I use this familiar term very broadly. superpositionally, many across the same physical vehicles
The primary focus is on traces as ‘representational’ rather (McClelland and Rumelhart 1986: 193; Clark 1993: 17),
than ‘non-representational’ resources, to use Heersmink’s with many ‘representations’ in or across one ‘representing’
terms for distinctive categories of cognitive artifact system (Haugeland 1991; van Gelder 1991). Every enduring
(Heersmink 2015, 2021), in that they carry some sort of trace is a composite, out of which some specific memory,
information, and in some key cases information about the for example, is constructed at the time of recall (O’Brien
past events that produced or affected them. The paper’s third 1991; Sutton 1998). Until that present process of construc-
point of departure is the fact that traces of many past events tion, distinct traces have in a sense disappeared, persisting
are often layered together or ‘superposed’. This can occur, only implicitly (Elman 1993: 89). This notion of superposi-
in distinctive ways, in the brain, in the body, or in the world1. tion provided the first of an expanding series of forms of
In a moment I explain the notion of superposition in play ‘distribution’: for Andy Clark, memory and cognition were
here, and discuss its source in the neurocognitive sciences2. distributed firstly thus within individual neural networks;
then doubly, across distinct but dynamically interacting
brain systems; and then multiply, across brain, body, and
1
I don’t have space to discuss forms of superposition and overlayer-
ing in embodied memory: for some ways into this fascinating but dis-
tinct topic see Behnke 1997; Sutton and Williamson 2014; Rowlands Sect. 4 below for the link to cultural theory.
2017; Chella 2019. 3
Kukla (2021: 122, 127, 245) uses the related term ‘palimpsest’,
2
Superposition is also theorized in distinct but interestingly related more familiar in literary and cultural studies, and discussed in Sect. 4
ways in geometry, geology, and most famously quantum theory: see below.

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Situated Affects and Place Memory

world operating together (Clark 1997; Sutton 2015a). Here change over time without losing grip on the need to make,
my attention is not primarily on the neural wings of the evaluate, contest, and remake claims on the past. These
larger distributed systems that came to be the focus of the challenges in the philosophy of memory are not centre
burgeoning alternative mainstream movements in cognitive stage here, as I move on to consider situated affectivity and
science (Hutchins 1995; Sutton 2010; Newen et al. 2018), place: but in examining places and practices, artifacts and
because I am examining exported or transported forms of artworks that can viscerally unsettle or move us, touching
superposition that operate beyond the brain. But I quickly our embodied and emotional being deeply, the intention is
note two points about this neurocognitive form of superpo- not to bypass or supplement existing cognitive theory about
sition which inform my treatment of situated affectivity. how we might construct the past well, but to provoke better
Firstly, these notions of superposition and distributed (cf Anderson 2022).
representation are not uniquely tied to these particular con- To prepare the ground to return to these puzzles about
nectionist and post-connectionist neural network models of superposition and the resources we use in constructing
cognitive processes. They operate at an abstract level, and the past, I first address directly the current state of play in
can be identified in very different scientific and historical broadly situated and 4E approaches to affective technolo-
contexts, in which we can spot familiar concerns about the gies and ecologies. While embracing the complexities and
implications of the radically constructive visions of memory critical perspectives highlighted by recent critics, I argue
and mind that they suggest (Sutton 1998, 2020a). Secondly, that attention to forms of disruption and affective imbal-
looking forward from the ‘80s and ‘90s rather than back, ance among the components of such dynamic ecologies is
recent innovations in deep learning are still animated by natural within these approaches, when correctly understood,
technical attempts to work with or work around the radically rather than a dramatic innovation. To put flesh on how this
constructive nature of systems heavily reliant on superposi- point applies in a relatively under-studied domain, I then
tion (McClelland et al. 2020; Shea 2023). They thereby gel discuss cognitive and affective ecologies of place. In a
in as yet under-recognized ways with pressing problems in briefer final section, I consider the narrower topic of artis-
contemporary cognitive neurophilosophy about how we can tic engagements with difficult pasts, sketching a provisional
ever remember specific past events if memory is so thor- aesthetics of superposition which falls out of the consider-
oughly constructive. If the neural systems and mechanisms ation of place as affective technology: I point to case studies
of remembering turn out to be identical with those of imag- that might feed directly back into cognitive theory, where
ining, counterfactual thinking, and other forms of event artistic practices are already deeply informed by sustained
simulation, perhaps we have to drop the idea that memory reflection on memory and emotion, places and the past, on
has some particular causal connection with the past events attempts to shape or wrangle or rework troubled pasts. The
on which it makes a claim (Michaelian 2016; Addis 2018). turn to art is not to apply cognitive theory, but actively to
This would be surprising and, perhaps, troubling, because expand, disrupt, or refine it.
we want to be realists about the past, no matter how frag- Before pushing ahead, I consolidate my concerns here
ile our access to it may be: it’s because we know we can and their connections. Established work on cognitive ecolo-
be wrong about past events that we struggle so hard to be gies within the distributed cognition framework can encom-
right, contesting and revising as we go (Craver 2020). There pass and effectively apply the critical turn in 4E cognitive
are a number of fronts in the debate about whether remem- theory and studies of affective technology. The case of place
bering is just one form of imagining or simulating events memory directly illustrates how the right kind of 4E theory
(Addis 2020; Michaelian 2016, 2022). It’s not yet clear that naturally addresses negative and violent forms of cognitive
there really is a single, undifferentiated internal ‘construc- and affective distribution, especially when we apply it to
tive episodic simulation’ system (Andonovski, Sutton, & problems of historically burdened heritage that are of inde-
McCarroll forthcoming). And we can lean on liberalized pendent importance. Focus on the multiplicity and hetero-
conceptions of causal processes, which allow for the layered geneity of resources across which mind and feeling may be
multiplicity of causal connections over time, without requir- distributed also highlights the significance of superposition,
ing linear and singular links between a single past event at when many meanings or traces of past events are overlaid, in
encoding and a single current act of retrieval (Schechtman brain and world alike. Examination of the challenges posed
1994; Andonovski 2020; Mac Cumhaill 2020; Sutton and by superposition and of how we do and should construct the
O’Brien 2022). Realism about the past does not mean that past from multiple traces, as individuals and as communi-
truth is either simple or singular. But it’s hard to think and ties, connects neurophilosophical concerns about memory’s
feel a way into such complicated relations between past and faithfulness to the past with political and aesthetic concerns
present, in which multiple coexisting traces may be entan- about apt modes of engagement with difficult pasts. The
gled, in which we can acknowledge loss and selectivity and paper covers a lot of ground, and throughout I provide a

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range of references to help connect currently disconnected affective incorporation, and affective ecology. Work on
projects and fields. ‘affective artifacts’, for example, effectively connects ideas
about situated emotions to questions about personal identity
and the ‘distributed self’ (Heersmink 2018; Piredda 2020)4.
2 Affective Ecologies and Distributed The fact that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of all
Disruption the literature on these concepts even within philosophy
alone confirms that we have entered a wonderfully fruit-
As work on distributed and extended cognition matured, ful phase in which ideas from quite different areas, from
focussing less on revolutions in metaphysics, more on philosophy of biology to phenomenology and beyond, are
identifying neglected phenomena of rich and sustained feeding research on distributed cognition and affect, which
interaction between brains, bodies, and worlds, and on is in turn offering a new lens on these other fields. This is
transforming methods for the study of issues of independent exactly what early theorists dreamed of when struggling to
interest, emotion became a natural target topic (Griffiths establish credibility for the idea that cognitive and affec-
and Scarantino 2009; Greenwood 2013; Varga and Krueger tive processes were not entirely ‘brain-bound’. Nearly 25
2013). I follow leading theorists in these fields in using years ago, Clark looked forward to a ‘spectacular’ future
‘affectivity’ as a label to signal the broad scope of the pay-off from the study of ‘the complex and iterated interac-
approach, intended to apply to many affective phenomena, tions’ between brains and technologies: ‘nothing less than
both occurrent and dispositional, from momentary emo- a new kind of cognitive scientific collaboration involving
tion episodes and appraisals to sentiments, temperaments, neuroscience, physiology, and social, cultural, and techno-
character traits, and moods (Colombetti and Roberts 2015; logical studies in about equal measure’ (Clark 2001: 154).
Candiotto 2016; Slaby 2016). In the explosion of outstand- That Clark did not explicitly include politics in this wish
ing work on situated affectivity that has followed, making list is notable now, after a decade in which a more critical
this perhaps the most productive application of a broadly and political philosophy of mind centrally focused on norms
distributed approach, we have seen increasingly precise and and normativity has gradually emerged and been effectively
refined differentiation in treating the disparate integrated implemented (Protevi 2009; Slaby 2016; Maiese and Hanna
resources in question – a great variety of artifacts and tech- 2019). I am delighted at and engaged with the variety and
nologies, other people, practices, environments, collectives quality of critiques and especially case studies of ‘callous
– and in pinning down ways to study them (Krueger and design’, ‘oppressive things’, ‘hostile scaffolding’, and more,
Osler 2019; León et al. 2019; Chung et al. 2024). In stress- currently arising from a broadly situated perspective, and
ing the heterogeneity of the resources in question, each of especially at their increasingly sophisticated incorporation
which has its own history, format, and dynamics, much of of evidence from ethnographies and social theory (Rosen-
this work highlights the complementary relations between berger 2017; Liao and Huebner 2021; Meissner and Hueb-
disparate but meshing components of expanded systems ner 2022; Spurrett and Brancazio 2023). The couple of
which have, as a result, new or transformed affective quali- complicating notes that follow should be read in this light.
ties (Krueger 2014: 538; Colombetti and Krueger 2015).
This broadly ‘second-wave’ approach to distributed affec-
tivity encourages us to pick out particular dimensions of
4
As Piredda puts it (2020: 561), ‘the web of affective artifacts that
we accumulate could be described as an affective exoskeleton of
interaction between elements of wider affective ecologies our affective world that contributes to a “topography of the self”
as frameworks within which to locate specific case studies (Heersmink 2018)’. While the concept of an ‘autotopography’ that
(cf. Sutton et al. 2010; Heersmink 2021). It also ensures Heersmink draws from González (1995) referred more to local spa-
that study of distributed affectivity cannot become encap- tial arrangements of personally significant objects, it can be naturally
expanded: first, as Heersmink points out, to include ‘grouptopogra-
sulated or cut off from other cognitive and socio-emotional phies’ or the ‘shared material landscapes of dyads or larger groups’
domains: attention to the development and entrenchment (2018: 1836), and second, as Piredda points out, to encompass places,
of practices or resources within a larger affective ecosys- such as homes and neighbourhoods (2020: 556; cf. Colombetti and
tem also confirms the essential roles of embodied memory, Krueger 2015: 1163). As an anonymous reviewer rightly notes, my
approach to place memory here has wider implications for thinking
active self-scaffolding, social relations, and communication about identity and extended selves. To date we have addressed such
in establishing and maintaining reliable emotion-regulation topics only indirectly, in work on the sociomaterial and environmen-
systems over time (Sutton 2018). tal resources on which long-married couples draw in remembering the
Alongside such case studies in situated affectivity, we shared past (Harris et al. 2014, 2022), and in work on shared agency
and the embodied transmission of place-based memory in culturally-
can now enjoy, evaluate, and apply more precise evaluation specific performance practice (Mingon and Sutton 2021): more sus-
of key descriptive concepts such as affective artifact, affec- tained attention to concepts like ‘place attachment’ and ‘belonging’
tive scaffold, affective niche, affective milieu, atmosphere, will be required for more precise attention to relations between place
and (individual or group) identity.

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Situated Affects and Place Memory

In suggesting that distributed cognition was always As often, it depends on where you were looking or seek-
attuned to the possibility of oppressive disruption at the ing your (constructive or critical) inspirations. For me, the
site of human-technology interfaces, and that attention to happy benefits of pre-formed individual users’ smooth cop-
more or less smooth coupling between agents and artifacts ing in manipulating artifacts created for their possession
never settled into such a blinkered form of boosterism and use, their profit and pleasure were never at the heart
as to deserve to be called a ‘dogma’ (Aagaard 2021), I of distributed cognition, as critics allege (Slaby 2016; Wil-
can briefly address historical and thematic issues in turn. liams 2016; Aagaard 2021). Firstly, minds soak in, rather
In terms of recent research history, first, as well as exca- than developing as autonomous users with clear instru-
vating the exchanges between Clark and Protevi which mental needs: the label ‘extended’ cognition has become
underlined that the same socio-historically constructed less helpful because it encourages the misconception that
scaffolding processes could at least as easily have politi- mind is first in the head, and only then spreads outwards
cally significant negative effects (e.g. Clark 2005: 257; to colonize things. On the actual distributed approach, in
Protevi 2009: 29), it would also be worth going further contrast, a broadly Vygotskyan take on cognitive and affec-
into the prehistory of situated and distributed cognition in tive development treats remembering and feeling as capaci-
education, anthropology, science studies, media, and soci- ties we learn over the course of gradual enculturation within
ology, where I suspect we’d find recognizable distributed- specific socio-affective contexts (Miller et al. 1990, 2014;
cognition themes driving ethnographies and case studies of Menary 2007; Wang 2013), such that (relational) autonomy
highly contested or conflictual agent-artifact interactions is an ongoing achievement, fallibly forged in (rather than
(Michaelian and Sutton 2013). But I also direct philoso- before or behind) the weave of our worldly lives (Sutton
phers to flourishing research programs in the history of 2010: 213). And more broadly, once we start thinking in
distributed cognition, which have come to fully infiltrate terms of the cognitive ecologies within which memory and
mainstream scholarship in fields from ancient philosophy affect are situated, it is obvious that we are dealing with vast
of technology to early modern literary culture, as demon- and uneven arrays of disparate resources, many or most of
strated in the remarkable four-volume collection A His- which are beyond any individual’s immediate control, no
tory of Distributed Cognition (2019), edited by Miranda matter how much they have been shaped by human culture
Anderson, Douglas Cairns, Mark Sprevak and Mike and history. In that the ecological approach directs us to
Wheeler. In the case of early modern affective technolo- notice and track shifting balances among the heterogeneous
gies, the work of Evelyn Tribble in testing, revising, and resources in any interactive cognitive ecosystem (Hutchins
expanding distributed approaches to emotion and memory 2010), it offers a new perspective on our cognitive and
across a range of early modern cultural-cognitive prac- affective vulnerability. On the one hand, we are by nature
tices including theatre, education, religion, design, and interdependent and thus intrinsically vulnerable to changes
embodied skills (Tribble 2005a, 2017a; Tribble and Keene in other parts of our wider affective ecologies (Mackenzie et
2011) has also been criticized for privileging smoothness al. 2014). On the other hand, differential vulnerability in the
and integration across disparate components of cognitive form of unequal access to the resources that permit flexible
ecosystems while neglecting moments of failure, contin- cognitive and affective expansion or adjustment is one of
gency, noise, or friction, for failing ‘to contemplate dis- the subtler mechanisms of power. As Krueger and Salice put
harmony or resistance’ (Mazzola 2023: 12). In fact Tribble it (2021), it is the relational nature of mind and action that
has arguably always highlighted tough affective effort and means ‘we are deeply vulnerable to manipulation by eco-
intense emotional interaction in concrete settings then logical constraints’, sometimes even with our awareness and
and now (Tribble 2005b, 2017b, 2022; on affective tech- consent. A distributed approach to affectivity as anchored or
nologies in early modern theatre see also Mullaney 2007; layered in to particular practices, places, or objects, perhaps
Rzepka 2015). in conjunction with cognitive-ethnographic observation of
To return to the thematic or conceptual issue, I accept the ways that participants in any affective regime manage
that some leading advocates for an extended or distributed and repair glitches, trouble, or breakdown, can potentially
approach to mind, memory, or emotion also sometimes reveal flexible and often communal distributed resilience in
revealed an optimistic technophilia, thus eliciting criticism people-place ecosystems (Throop and Duranti 2015; Gillett
of the ‘many fancy formulations’ that served sometimes to 2022; Tribble 2022).
keep theoretical projects clear of troubling political issues So disruption of various kinds and with various sources
(Slaby 2016: 5). But I deny that any such blindness, or is structural rather than optional, given the uneven and
any motivated neglect of disruption, contradiction, and dynamic nature of distributed cognitive and affective
conflict was (or is) intrinsic to distributed cognition as a ecologies. Slaby does acknowledge that ‘the adult human
framework. mind is structurally invaded’ (2016:11). But in some of

13
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the critical literature there is perhaps a danger of again ‘outsourcing’ to Google and the internet what our brains
treating reliance on particular systems, environments, should be doing: some such work persists in treating the
or other people as in tension with either autonomy or an relevant unit of analysis or comparison as the unaided
active democratic moral-political consciousness. In talk- biological brain operating ‘naked’ or in isolation. I can’t
ing of ‘invasion’ (as indeed of ‘extension’), we need to here address or respond to these new versions of very old
explicitly reject the implication that there is something moral panics (but see Heersmink 2016; Heersmink and
unformed just there waiting to be influenced, whether for Sutton 2020; Orben 2020): in the current context I want
good or ill (Sutton 2011). We also need to remember that merely to remind us that outside cognitive philosophy
while the natural search for the bad actors who are doing it is even harder to find anything like a ‘dogma of har-
the invading or disrupting may sometimes locate particu- mony’ about human-technology relations, and easier to
lar (individual or corporate) agents who are deliberately find technical systems being treated as wholly external
manipulating our open and porous mental lives for their sources of disruption or invasion. So while it is apt to
own ends (Timms & Spurrett 2023), we are also perfectly caution those of us who do treat cognition and affect as
capable of disrupting ourselves or choosing our own nasty open and distributed against excessive focus on and con-
niches, both through uneven and idiosyncratic processes fidence in smooth coping and problem-solving, leading
of moral enculturation and internalization, and simply as us towards more nuanced treatments of the complexity of
a result of inevitable conflicts or shifting balances among particular ecologies, I also underline just how difficult it
the various disparate resources which partly constitute is, in modern Western culture especially, really to hold on
our capacities to remember, navigate, or feel. Likewise, to a sustained acknowledgement of our constitutive inter-
a problem with the language of cognitive and affective dependence, right across the lifespan, on other people and
‘scaffolding’ is the implication that it can or should be other resources beyond skull and skin (Clark 2003; Har-
dismantled once the edifice inside is constructed, a mis- court 2016).
leading implication that takes us back to the internal- The new critical turn is offering fruitful attention to
ist positions we wanted to reject (Sutton 2015b; Larvor a range of particular negative cases, developing useful
2020). taxonomies of the sources of vulnerability to affective
It is important to recall that the individualist forms of and cognitive harms, and criteria for the normative eval-
classical cognitivism against which distributed frame- uation of affective niches (Nagatsu and Salmela 2022).
works were developed had no conceptual resources at all Loaded normative terms for describing particular distrib-
for incorporating an interest in normativity within cog- uted systems – like ‘virtuous’, ‘empowering’, ‘vicious’,
nitive theory. It is only once we have replaced the indi- ‘harmful’, ‘problematic’ or ‘unhealthy’ (Slaby 2016;
vidualist conception or ideal of mind or mature agency Williams 2016) – may sometimes have clear and uncon-
as self-sufficiency with the alternative vision of cogni- troversial applications when we consider obviously
tive and affective interdependence at the heart of human oppressive ecologies. But normative judgements won’t
nature that we can even raise ethical and political concerns always be so easy just to read off descriptive accounts
about the dangers of specific cognitive or affective arti- of the operations of more ambiguous forms of interac-
facts and institutions, and begin to draw on and contrib- tion and distribution, and the same affective ecology may
ute to a genuinely interdisciplinary political philosophy have radically different temporary or enduring effects in
of mind. Despite the welcome rise of the distributed and different contexts or for different people and groups. In
4E alternatives, internalism is still a default assumption some cases it may not be appropriate for the theorist to
in many contemporary domains and debates, from main- make such open and contested evaluations, which may be
stream neuroscience and cognitive psychology to main- better left to those directly engaged with the artifacts or
stream politics and popular culture. Alignment between equipment in question. These points, indeed, are famil-
those powerful forces is apparent, for example, in some iar in the adjacent philosophical discussion of histori-
treatments – both scientific and popular – of our increas- cally burdened heritage such as monuments, statues, and
ing and diversifying reliance on technologies in every- memorials, which is now a prime site for integration of
day cognitive life. While there is outstanding research on political as well as aesthetic considerations into theories
the different ways that different people lean or rely on of cognitive and affective technology (Archer 2024). It
particular technical systems in different contexts and for is in this spirit that I move on to consider one particular
different tasks (Finley et al. 2018), there is also a vein strand of the interconnected sets of resources that can
of work on the impairment or degradation of our cogni- in certain circumstances partly constitute our individual
tive capacities over time by (over-)reliance on technolo- and shared processes of thinking, feeling, and remember-
gies like photography and GPS, or by ‘offloading’ and ing – place.

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Situated Affects and Place Memory

3 Affective Place Memory5 Perhaps in certain circumstances places can partly consti-
tute the processes and activities of feeling and remembering.
Places can have visceral power to evoke past experiences. Historically and culturally unique landscapes, architectures,
Certain memories and emotions do not arise if we are not technologies and ecologies will then not always be external
back in a particular place, such that it can feel as if place to mental life. Places can sometimes be parts of (distributed)
partly holds our pasts for us or with us. It is just because vehicles of memory and emotion that span brain, body, and
memory and emotion can attach so deeply to accustomed world, complementing our biological resources in place-
terrain or neighbourhoods that displacement is such violent people cognitive-affective ecosystems. Although places
disruption, affective and cognitive as much as economic and have all kinds of properties of their own, and may be active
political. The negative side of distributed cognition and situ- components of such heterogeneous ecosystems, accumulat-
ated affect is easy to see on this point, and this is the most ing their own histories at various timescales (Basso 1996;
straightforward connection between these themes here (cf. Turkel 2007), this is not a turn to panpsychism (Candiotto
Nine 2018; Piredda 2020: 556). To take this natural link fur- 2022). The idea is not that places remember or feel on their
ther, I suggest that a strongly distributed approach to place own, no more than that the black tie I wear to a funeral is
memory is needed to make sense of the deep emotional sig- ‘doing my grieving for me’ (Harris 2004: 729), or that the
nificance of place in the lives and projects of individuals disconnected or naked brain remembers or grieves on its
and groups. own. As Haugeland put it, it’s not that the road to San Jose
Places can play a great variety of roles in our cognitive knows the way on its own, but that the road and I collabo-
and affective lives6. To simplify, and to pick out memory rate: not all the structure of intelligence is ‘external’, but
and emotion as interconnected test domains, we can con- some or much of it may be, ‘in a way that is integral to the
sider three kinds of relation. First, places can be the objects rest’ (1998: 233-5; Sutton 2020b)7.
or contents of memory or emotion: I remember Lisbon One immediate benefit of this picture of places as poten-
(from my visits in 1992 and 2023), and I have a range of tially partly constitutive of remembering and feeling is
feelings about it and specific places in it. Second, places can that it gives us initial grip on how some people develop a
be stimuli or cues to memory or emotion, notoriously often deep embodied familiarity with particular places. When we
triggering intense or surprising feelings and forgotten epi- inhabit neighbourhoods or territories in a more or less stable
sodes, experiences that may be affectively mediated in the way, in cycles of activities, tasks, or routines, the sense of
present by associations between the place and other people, belonging or attachment need not be an object of reflection
songs, or things. but can be taken for granted in seamless embodied interac-
It may initially seem as if these two significant modes tions in well-trodden locations. This does not require that
or forms – places as objects of and as cues to memory and individuals or groups be permanently settled – deep place
emotion – are the primary or even the only significant rela- knowledge need not be fixed, and can also arise in patterns
tions between place and the mind. If this is all, then places of movement over time, sometimes being transferred or
– like, perhaps, bodies, other people, and artifacts – are transformed in inhabiting new places. It is affective through
always and inevitably external to the mind, merely provid- and through, but it is not only affective. It involves many
ing stimuli and fields for action while the real psychological interacting forms of memory and knowledge as well as
processes occur in the brain. Below I address some possible highly attuned perceptual, spatial, and social capacities that
implications for political and environmental action from this are not easy to study in controlled laboratory settings. We
thought that there is no constitutive cognitive or affective must draw on disparate research resources such as history,
interdependence between places and minds. First, I move on ethnography, and philosophy to catch it in action. Wood’s
to the third, stronger and more controversial, way of think- cultural history of ‘topographies of remembrance’ in early
ing about relations between place, memory, and emotion, modern England reveals ‘an inhabited, known landscape,
directly driven by a distributed framework.
7
In the spirit of second- and third-wave situated cognition theory,
5
we will not seek sharp criteria by which to distinguish cases in which
‘Place memory’ is used as a useful umbrella label for a variety of places are and are not thus partly constitutive of memory and emo-
phenomena, not as naming a putative kind tion. Rather, we will map dimensions of interaction between agents
6
These remarks draw on many areas of research on place and mem- and buildings, neighbourhoods, or landscapes, tracking for example
ory, many of which remain somewhat disconnected, where distrib- the intensity of cognitive and affective interdependence in specific
uted and situated approaches can hope to act as integrative catalysts contexts. Like Clark and Chalmers’ original ‘trust and glue’ condi-
for bringing outstanding ideas into contact, across for example the tions, these will typically be matters of degree, such that different
phenomenology of place, memory, and emotion (Casey 1987, 2003, cases and examples will fall in different regions of a multidimen-
2021; Smith 2017), the ethnography of wayfinding (Aporta and Higgs sional space (Sutton et al. 2010; Heersmink 2021), as we turn meta-
2005), and the cognitive neurosciences of spatial cognition (Velasco physical distinctions into tractable, empirically-accessible enquiries.
and Spiers 2024). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

13
 J. Sutton

one walked across, worked on, ploughed over, dug into … attention to normative issues in understanding cognitive and
a taskscape’ that invited and supported rhythms of embod- affective ecologies. Differential access to and control over
ied and affective interactions at multiple timescales (Wood places, spaces, and routes is not simply a political concern,
2013: 188, 198; Sutton 2020b). Brown and Laurier (2005) but can be directly and simultaneously a means of cognitive
track the extraordinarily flexible decision-making of a life- and affective manipulation. At the level of bodily-affective
long inhabitant of London as she negotiates the daily chal- styles and interactions, ‘the politics of space’ plays out con-
lenges of work travel across the city in changing contexts. stantly in the ways some buildings and public spaces oper-
Stirling and colleagues (2022) confirm the remarkable accu- ate actively to disorient or thwart or threaten some potential
racy of directional and place knowledge revealed in casual occupants, reflecting or enforcing or celebrating certain val-
conversation among long-term workers in the vast Kimber- ues and capacities, and not others (Krueger 2021; Crippen
ley regions of north-western Australia. Kukla points us to 2022). On a larger scale, it is just because land and build-
the exquisitely refined attention characteristic of spatially ings can directly scaffold and partly constitute joy, comfort,
and socioculturally skilled urban agents, profoundly attuned embodied skills, and shared memories as well as economic
to the affective tone of embodied micro-negotiations on well-being that colonial removals of people from their land
the streets and to any salient novelties in the built or lived were such brutal and all-encompassing violence, obliter-
urban setting (2021: 13–82), just as Wood’s early modern ating values and crafts and situated memories as well as
workers were constantly ‘reading, monitoring and remem- livelihoods (Campbell 2014a, b). This aligns also with the
bering change in the local world down to its most precise inclusion of ‘deportation’ – the forcible transfer of a group
details’ (2013: 229). In contrast, with the notable exception from one territory to another – among the ‘crimes against
of one research program on memory in London taxi drivers humanity’ established at Nuremberg and confirmed in the
(Maguire et al. 2000; Griesbauer et al. 2022), experimental Geneva Convention and at the International Criminal Court,
psychologists are only beginning to find ways to operation- as mobilized for example in repeated international legal
alize the effects on memory of deep familiarity with par- proceedings to force the United Kingdom to allow the Cha-
ticular neighbourhoods (Penaud et al. 2022). Deep place gos Islanders right of return to their stolen Indian Ocean
knowledge is challenging to study not just because of the homelands (Jeffery 2013; Sands 2022).
need to find appropriate participants, but because it seems Indeed, again, given the vast and uneven array of place-
to involve rich integrations of what are usually treated as related resources that can partly constitute emotion and
distinct forms of knowledge or memory. It is neither like memory, there will never be invulnerable, entirely secure
the case of someone who knows a lot about a city but has or stable relations between places and minds. No genuine or
never been there; nor the case of someone with hippocampal thoroughgoing distributed approach to place memory could
deficits who retains a capacity to follow overlearned routes fall for a dogma of harmony. There is always risk, openness,
(Jeffery 2019: 858). This kind of knowledge of places is change, actual or potential trouble in the ways that we think,
vitally intelligent, and may have distinctive psychological feel, and remember the past individually and together in and
and epistemic features as perceptual and cognitive expertise with and through our familiar environments. One brilliant
operate alongside affective engagement (Kukla 2023). analysis of a place-based cognitive and affective ecology is
This distributed perspective on affect and cognition in the Homeric scholar Aldo Paolo Bottino’s (2020) work on
people-place ecosystems offers an extra dimension to stud- ‘space, time, and remembering in the orchard of Laertes’
ies of forced mobility, displacement, diaspora, and ‘solas- in book 24 of The Odyssey9. An episode that has puzzled
talgia’8 in geography, memory studies, and cultural theory ancient and modern readers alike – Odysseus’s final reunion
(Read 1996; Creet and Kitzmann 2014; Albrecht 2019; with his father, after the slaughter of the suitors and his night
Erll 2020; Hage 2021; Mayblin and Turner 2021). These with Penelope – comes to life in Bottino’s ecological read-
are fields in which cognitive theory and indeed psychol- ing. Trying to drop his disguise and have his father recog-
ogy more broadly has often, understandably but unfortu- nize and acknowledge him, Odysseus takes him walking
nately, been seen as irrelevant at best, actively imperialist among the trees, naming them by type as Laertes had years
and reductionist at worst, just because of the individualism ago when Odysseus was a child. The two men reconnect
that was characteristic of classical cognitivism, which left with their shared history, overcome the grief of absence, and
no easy roads between the disciplines. But it is clear that the find joy and common purpose only in thus moving among
distributed cognition approach to place actively encourages and noticing the trees with their stability and differently-
paced existence, themselves re-instantiating that past event.
8
Solastalgia is place-based distress caused by environmental change,
for example when land that people have lived on continuously is 9
The final version of this preprint is due to appear in Bottino’s forth-
transformed or degraded by industrial exploitation, or by climate coming book on The Odyssey. I address his analysis more extensively
change (Askland and Bunn 2018; Albrecht 2019). in joint work in progress with Lyn Tribble.

13
Situated Affects and Place Memory

Remembering here is a joint and site-specific performance, memorial building by Rudy Ricciotti opened in 2015,
with the men’s embodied activity as they retrace their own embedded in the earth at the heart of the Camp, bewilder-
past footsteps realigning the disparate components of this ingly hard to access but in its powerful multimedia exhibi-
orchard ecology. Bottino’s analysis does justice to the non- tions vividly evoking not just the specific histories of those
human elements in this complex scene which play their part who lived and died there, but also our ongoing inability to
in holding and reactivating the shared past. While the analy- find humane space for today’s vast refugee populations.
sis ends, like the passage of the poem, with the father and This application of the concept of superposition, to
son united and heading together into the future, it shows catch places with traces of multiple pasts, is clearly related
clearly how intense were the troubling emotions like despair to the scientific one with which I began, and also picks up
that were activated along the way. directly Walter Benjamin’s references to ‘co-spatial’ layer-
A range of other enquiries follow naturally from adop- ings of different temporal strata of the same city, and the
tion of a situated or distributed conception of affective related notion of the ‘palimpsest’ in media and literary
place memory. We can investigate substantial individual theory: indeed Rivesaltes has been called ‘France’s concen-
differences in ways of inhabiting, navigating, and describ- trationary palimpsest’ (Cantoni 2022: 253)10. Compared to
ing routes and places. We can deploy ideas about socially other war internment sites like the Camp des Milles near
distributed cognition and emotion to address collaborative Aix-en-Provence (Sumartojo and Graves 2018), and against
wayfinding, a topic barely studied in the cognitive sciences the wider category of historically burdened heritage, super-
until recently (Dalton et al. 2019; Velasco 2022; Curtin and position at Rivesaltes is in a sense straightforwardly enacted
Montello 2023): this is strange given its ubiquity and impor- on the ground, with it falling on the visitor to construct
tance, most of us being familiar with conflict and failure in responses and reactions in tracing a path now through the
trying to find our way together, even when using GPS. And site and the rich and heartbreaking archival materials. But
we can expand the unit of analysis in studies of technol- there is a sense in which Rivesaltes thus only literalizes
ogy use, acknowledging possible changes in spatial learning or magnifies a feature of many monuments or memorials
but attending to augmented GPS designs that may promote (for the distinction, as drawn by Danto, see Shapshay 2021:
active engagement or ‘cognitive diligence’ (Hebblewhite 149), and indeed of many places with complex or difficult
and Gillett 2021; Wunderlich and Gramann 2021). In each pasts, where we in the present (whoever we are, positioned
case, whether examining cognitive and affective aspects of in whatever relations to the various past events in question)
digital spatial technologies, or treating places and spaces can only deploy the disparate resources and traces available
themselves as forms of technology which can exploit or in the present to construct our best cognitive and affective
empower particular populations, we are putting the situated responses.
perspective actively to work to better understand the inter- Archer’s paper (2024) in this special issue takes a great
active unfolding of our affective lives. To finish, I zoom in step forward in philosophical discussion of public monu-
to the more specific arena of political and artistic engage- ments and artifacts precisely by bringing ideas of situated
ments with places with multiple or difficult pasts, which affect to bear. Compared to other recent philosophical lit-
also brings us back to superposition. erature on commemoration (see Lim and Lai 2024 for a
rich and economical survey), Archer’s approach draws on
ideas about distributed affect to widen our sense of the
4 Modes of Engagement with Difficult channels by which statues in particular have their visceral
Pasts: A First Sketch of an Aesthetics of impact as affective technologies. As Archer recognizes,
Superposition like Lim and Lai, the philosophical debate could also be

The Rivesaltes Camp Memorial near Perpignan in south- 10

A palimpsest is a written surface carrying two (or more) texts, typi-
western France is an extraordinary site. Across thirty years cally with a first original text partly erased or effaced, and overwritten
of the mid-20th century, this windswept plain of makeshift by a later second text, but still partially visible or otherwise accessible.
huts saw the detention of four very different groups: Spanish While there is much overlap between superposition and the palimp-
sest, I stick with the concept of superposition now for the following
republicans fleeing Franco; French Jews rounded up under reasons. In its origin and many uses, ‘palimpsests’ are textual, and as
Vichy to be taken East to die; captured German prisoners of a result operate only as metaphors for the operations of non-textual
war; and Algerian refugees, the ‘Harkis’, seeking asylum in memories or places. In some contexts, reference to a palimpsest sug-
France after independence (Peschanski 2002). The dark his- gests simpler chronological layering or stratigraphy, and encourages
a search to uncover the primary underlying hidden meaning. These
tories of these distinct groups are all superposed in the very implications are contested by many theorists, in ways that bring the
same huts where they were interned, now standing in ruined notion closer to superposition. See Silverman 2013; Bartolini 2014;
formation in the bleak bright dusty landscape. A stunning King 2017; Perletti 2021; Mattheis and Gurr 2021; Ingold 2022; Gurr
2023; Silverman 2023.

13
 J. Sutton

helpfully further expanded by setting studies of particu- First, as foreshadowed above in Kukla’s account of
lar toxic monuments in the broader contexts of the inter- Berlin’s counter-preservationiist impulse, it challenges the
connected social practices and institutions within which idea that we can recover an original or canonical version,
objectionable artifacts have for a time held a fixed place whether of a song or of the past – all we will construct now
(Lim and Lai 2024: 6). One fruitful source here is work are more versions, which we can do more or less responsi-
in memory studies like Rigney’s (2022) application of a bly and more or less effectively, in ongoing process. Second,
more holistic conception of mnemonic regime change to and relatedly, it ‘flaunts its constructedness’ (Gurr 2023:
the Colston case in Bristol, where the dynamics of cultural 75), accepting or celebrating the creative refashioning that
memory had already been in increasingly tense motion for occurs in putting traces together now: as the dub pioneers
some time, and alternative narratives were in place, where said, ‘every spoil is a style’ (Veal 2007: 45–46). This is,
decommissioning Colston went together with a broader again, not to give up on the past or on the responsibility
‘un-forgetting’ of slavery, violence, and colonial injustice to make claims on it now: rather, problems arise when we
(Rigney 2022: 22–32; Araujo 2020). My last speculations try to disguise the filters and processes that we are using
here look to memory studies and cultural theory to sketch to access or narrate it now. If we retain the disjunctures
a preliminary aesthetics of superposition as one among between past and present, double-coding our work or our
many possible modes of engagement with difficult places memories or our actions as both ‘this-was’ and ‘this-is’, we
and multiple traces. do not conjure an illusion of presence or transparency, or of
Typically, we no longer accept denial and suppression some literal form of ‘mental time travel’, but rather allow
of difficult past events; and increasingly we are also dis- the seams of the presented past to fray, the interface to reap-
satisfied with either the straightforward destruction or pear, and the medium between us and the past to stay visible
obliteration of objectionable artifacts or pasts, or the mere (Wheeler 2019; Lucas 2020). Finally, what is productive in
juxtaposition of counter-narratives, both which strategies this mode of engaging the superposed traces of the past is
fail actively to face and unsettle, dissolve, or replace the transformation, not preservation. The changes across ver-
takes on the past that we now question or reject (Marschall sions, the erasures and accumulations, the seepage and the
2019). This leaves us with a range of alternative political sedimentations and the selections, are the engine of the
and aesthetic modes of engagement, that may more actively work (Rothberg 2012) or of the active processes of feeling
confront the past by in some way re-enacting or performing and remembering, not seeking to reproduce one single past
it, or may intervene and alter present traces of the past so as event, but evoking the tangling or overlaying of multiple
to reimagine it afresh11. Or, we can find or settle into quieter traces.
modes of engagement which might celebrate, rearrange, and These are merely one set of responses to our current cri-
flaunt the superposed traces we find around us. ses of commemoration, among other ways of engaging with
Gibson (2015) sees much effective memory art as a the ‘skewing dynamism of the past’ (Gibson 2015). The
‘forensic activity’, where artworks are ‘built from traces hope is that, as our initial concerns with the challenges of
… left lying around in archives, in landscapes, in objects, constructing the past from multiple present resources find
in people’s bodies, in biographies and in family histories’. urgent and specific instantiation in these place-based proj-
Such ‘memoryscopes’ detect ‘some lurking change’ in a ects, we can enrich memory theory and cognitive theory
remnant or trace, and channel it now in ‘a surge that zings too: we see that constructing something now need not be
some vivacy or aggravation’, helping us to sense how ‘the in tension with the attempt to be faithful to the past, but
past is abroad in our present-day experience’. Developing may precisely be a way of being responsible to that past.
Gibson’s ‘aesthetics of seepage and submergence’ (2015: Constructing a usable past is a paradigmatic exercise and
60) against both his own case studies like the history of component of individual and community agency (Campbell
Jamaican dub music (Veal 2007; Gibson 2010), and further 2006; Brown and Reavey 2015; Kukla 2022), and it can
case studies in contemporary memory art practice, including be done well or badly, better or worse, in any context and
that of Janet Cardiff, William Kentridge, and Norman Klein, given any sets of goals and constraints. Managing to do so
I suggest the following provisional principles for an aesthet- well enough is always an achievement, settling on who and
ics of superposition. where and when and why in ways that we hope will guide
action well in the present. It is something we do, even if in
our world of violence and distress ‘this is often the work of
11
In ongoing work in progress I examine these two modes of engage- broken hearts or exhausted souls’ (Stegemann 2021: 31). I
ment through case studies of the performance piece Minefield/ Campo
Minada by Lola Arias (2016), with Argentine and British veterans of hope to have shown that examining place as a key dimen-
the 1982 war in the Malvinas/ Falkland Islands; and of some of the sion of ecologies of memory and affect opens up a range
‘material playgrounds’ created by RAAAF, the Rietveld Art-Architec-
ture-Affordances Foundation (Rietveld 2022; Sutton 2022).

13
Situated Affects and Place Memory

Anderson M, Cairns D, Sprevak M, Wheeler M (eds) (2019) A history

of independently interesting topics for insistently interdisci- of distributed cognition. 4 volumes. Edinburgh UP
plinary enquiry in cognitive theory and beyond. Andonovski N (2020) Singularism about episodic memory. Rev Philos
Psychol 11(2):335–365
Acknowledgements My thanks to audiences in Edinburgh, Lisbon, Andonovski N, Sutton J, McCarroll C (eds) (forthcoming) Eliminat-
Odense, Oslo, Paris, and Stirling for helpful comments on earlier ver- ing episodic memory? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
sions. At the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, Justin Smith’s inci- Society B
sive commentary and conversations with Emmanuel Krieke and my Aporta C, Higgs E (2005) Satellite culture: global positioning systems,
other fellow fellows influenced my project greatly. I am very grateful Inuit wayfinding, and the need for a new account of technology.
to Graeme Friedman, Sarah Gensburger, Alex Gillett, Christine Harris- Curr Anthropol 46(5):729–753
Smyth, Ten-Herng Lai, John Protevi, David Spurrett, Lyn Tribble, and Araujo AL (2020) Slavery in the age of memory: engaging the past.
Mike Wheeler for significant support on various fronts, and to a num- Bloomsbury
ber of my wonderful graduate students who have influenced my think- Archer A (2024) How public statues wrong: affective artifacts and
ing on these topics, especially Mats Haraldsen, Richard Heersmink, affective injustice. Topoi, p 1–11
Chris McCarroll, McArthur Mingon, and Marina Trakas. Helpful com- Askland HH, Bunn M (2018) Lived experiences of environmental
ments from two anonymous reviewers are much appreciated. Work on change: solastalgia, power and place. Emot Space Soc 27:16–22
the paper has been supported by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow- Bartolini N (2014) Critical urban heritage: from palimpsest to breccia-
ship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, by Templeton grant no. tion. Int J Herit Stud 20(5):519–533
61924 ‘Concepts as Dynamic Assemblages’ awarded to Agustín Fuen- Basso K (1996) Wisdom sits in places. University of New Mexico
tes and Greg Downey, and by a Leverhulme visiting fellowship at the Behnke EA (1997) Ghost gestures: phenomenological investigations
University of Stirling. of bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal implications.
Hum Stud 20(2):181–201
Funding Leverhulme Trust international visiting fellowship, Univer- Bottino AP (2020) Space, time, and remembering in the orchard of
sity of Stirling, 2023-24. Laertes: an ecological approach. URL: https://chs.harvard.edu/
John Templeton Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 61924. wp-content/uploads/2020/11/fdrafts-bottino-space.pdf
Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Mem- Brown B, Laurier E (2005) Maps and journeys: an ethno-methodolog-
ber Institutions ical investigation. Cartographica: Int J Geographic Inform Geovi-
sualization 40(3):17–33
Brown S, Reavey P (2015) Vital memory and affect: living with a dif-
Data Availability not applicable.
ficult past. Routledge
Campbell J (1994) Past, space, and self. MIT Press
Declaration Campbell J (1997) The structure of time in autobiographical memory.
Eur J Philos 5(2):105–118
Competing Interests Not applicable. Campbell S (2006) Our faithfulness to the past: reconstructing mem-
There are no competing interests to declare. ory value. Philosophical Psychol 19(3):361–380
Campbell S (2014a) Remembering for the future: memory as a lens on
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Canada’s Indian residential schools truth and reconciliation com-
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, mission. In: Campbell S (ed) Our faithfulness to the past: the eth-
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, ics and politics of memory. Oxford University Press, p 135–164
as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the Campbell S (2014b) Challenges to memory in political contexts: rec-
source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate ognizing disrespectful challenge. In: Campbell S (ed) Our faith-
if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this fulness to the past: the ethics and politics of memory. Oxford
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless University Press, p 165–204
indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not Candiotto L (2016) Extended affectivity as the cognition of primary
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use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted Candiotto L (2022) Loving the earth by loving a place: a situ-
use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright ated approach to the love of nature. Constructivist Found
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