Networked Remembrance

Samuel Merrill is an interdisciplinary researcher based at the Department of Sociology’s Digital Social Research Unit at Umeå University. He completed his doctorate in Cultural Geography at University College London in 2014.

• CONTENTS: Departure Points – Social Memory in and under the City – Working across and beneath London and Berlin – Mapping an Icon: The Underground’s Mnemonic Cartographies – Reflection: The Changing Symbolism of Berlin’s Network Map – Naming the Network: The U- and S-Bahn’s Commemorative Toponyms – Reflection: The Underground’s Toponymic Heritage – The Roots of Resistance: Memory Work at Samariterstraße Station – Reflection: The Compensatory Memorialization of De Menezes – Accounting for Trauma: Memorializing Accidents under London – Reflection: Memorial Absence in the U- and S-Bahn – Networked Ruins: Re-encountering London’s Disused Stations – Reflection: (Re)membering Berlin’s Buried Ghost-Stations – Art from Below: Creating Mnemonic Imaginaries in the Vestiges of the U10 – Reflection: Mixing Memory at Aldwych – Infrastructures of Memory beneath and beyond London and Berlin.

«In Networked Remembrance, Sam Merrill explores in detail the production of social memory in what has so far been an underexplored terrain in memory studies, the underground transport networks. In a densely written, engaging and cleverly structured book, Merrill descends into the London Underground and Berlin Untergrundbahn (U-Bahn) and Stadtschnellbahn (S-Bahn) to offer an empirically rich take on the ways in which these two undergrounds become part of urban remembering (and forgetting).»(Petr Gibas, The London Journal 43/2018)«[...] the book makes an important contribution to the study of London and Berlin, the history of underground infrastructure, and understandings of cultural and social memory.»(Rebecca Clare Dolgoy, German Studies Review, 41/3 2018)