A Garden From Ashes: The Post-9/11, Manhattan City-Shrine, the Triangle Fire Memorial March, and the Educative Value of Mourning

• In Event: Roundtable Session 68
  In Roundtable Session: Place, Posterity, and Possibility: Writing the Past, Imagining the Future

Abstract

2011 tolls bells of remembrance in New York City, marking two momentous, catastrophic occasions: the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 100-year anniversary of the Triangle factory fire. This coincidental juxtaposition presents a singular opportunity to revisit mourning practices of each event. I analyze accounts, employing Freudian mourning theory, so that as educators we might learn from the ways these collective losses were mourned and how the current-day example of the post-9/11 city-shrine signals a dramatic shift, resembling not modern-day, but pre-Freudian, Victorian mourning practice. Given my analysis, I consider how educators might confront the enormity of both collective and individual loss in the lives of children in schools.

Author

• Stacy Otto, Illinois State University