Designing Places of Exception as Places of Learning: The Tule Lake National Monument

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Public Education: Critical Geographies and Border Pedagogies

Abstract

Part of a broader study of place-based educational projects which teach about violations of civil and human rights during eras of heightened national security, “Designing Places of Exception as Places of Learning” is a qualitative case study of the Tule Lake National Historic Monument. Located on the California-Oregon border and managed by the National Park Service, Tule Lake was one of the largest of the ten concentration camps that operated during World War II to imprison Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Informed chiefly by Giorgio Agamben’s theorizing of a “state of exception,” this study examines what happens when sites of incarceration are mobilized such that they become places for teaching and learning.

Author

• Cathlin Bryn Goulding, 9/11 Museum & Memorial