Derek Alderman, a professor in the Department of Geography, is part of a team of scholars who received the 2020 Zumkehr Prize for Scholarship in Public Memory for their paper, “Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives” published in the Journal of Heritage Tourism.
“The article is one of several published from an NSF-funded project that investigated the representation of the history of slavery at southern plantation museums,” Alderman said.
Researchers identified and critiqued spatial narratives across several similar public memory sites, including taking 170 tours of plantation sites in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia to inform and explore the manner and extent to which Southern plantations are incorporating the history of slavery, the challenges they face in doing justice to the memories and identities of the enslaved, and how visitors and plantation management and staff interpret and shape the narration of those memories.
Co-authors on the paper are affiliated with Tourism RESET, a multi-university and cross-disciplinary research and industry-engagement initiative that addresses social inequality in the travel and tourism. The program is based at UT and co-directed with Stefanie Benjamin, an associate professor in the Department of Retail, Hospitality, and Tourism Management.
“In addition to the recognition this honor brings to the NSF project and RESET, I am especially proud of the large number of students from UT who contributed over the past few years to the data collection and the field-testing of the ‘narrative mapping’ methodology highlighted in the paper,” he said.
Co-authors on the paper include Stephen Hanna from the University of Mary Washington, Perry Carter from Texas Tech University, Amy Potter from Georgia Southern University, Candace Forbes Bright from East Tennessee State University, E. Arnold Modlin from Norfolk State University, and David Butler from Middle Tennessee State University.
Read more about the Zumkehr Prize for Public Memory
-By Kelly Alley