This editorial introduction to this special issue of Space
and Culture takes Sites of Conscience as a prism through which to consider relations between
history, memory, politics, temporality, ethics, and justice within a spatial framework. Given the
increasing pressures to simplify and “purify” national narratives and to pathologize multiple
forms of difference, we urgently need activist scholarship on the salient relations between place,
history, memory, memorialization, and social justice.