Ansel Adams, photograph of Manzanar Cemetery Monument (1943).

On Location 2025: Information Session - ZOOM

Please join us to learn about On Location 2025!

Instructors Heidi Kolk and Kelley Van Dyck Murphy will discuss the course material, trip overview and answer questions.

L98 479/L98 579
COURSE DATES: MAY 13 - 30, 2025

ON LOCATION: DISLOCATED is a travel-based course that explores that difficult history by means of immersive exploration of the cultural and material landscapes of Japanese American incarceration, giving special attention to the problems of memory associated with these events. 

We will begin our exploration with a brief introduction and visits to relevant sites in St. Louis, before traveling to California. Along the way, we will visit many other places––marked and unmarked, official and unofficial, visible and invisible––associated with Japanese American immigration, identity, and the incarceration experience, including several in San Francisco. We will seek out sites of community resistance, resilience, memory, and memorialization, from revered institutions (e.g. the Japanese American National Museum, National Japanese American Historical Society, and the UC-Berkeley / Bancroft Library) to grass-roots-sponsored initiatives as well as sites and popular heritage / tourist destinations (e.g. Angel Island, Japantown, former Tanforan Assembly Center). 
 
Students will pursue collaborative site-based investigations of the cultural landscape, making frequent reference to local experts and guest speakers, archival, ethnographic, and visual evidence, and the elements of the built environment. This work will also be informed by methods / readings drawn from diverse disciplines, including social history, archaeology, geography / landscape studies, architectural history, design, cultural / ethnic studies, and others; as well as from by the stories of survivors and work of memory activists, psycho-social studies of the traumatic effects of incarceration; and arts-based efforts to uncover these suppressed histories. We will also give consideration to the political climates and context of the broader phenomenon of collective forgetting––during both the periods in question, and in our own time.

The application window is open now for On Location 2025, click here to apply. 

RSVP to Alison Eigel Zade for the Zoom link.