Doctor Sarah De Nardi

Adjunct Fellow,
Dean's Unit, School of Social Sciences

Lecturer in Heritage and Tourism,
Geography, Tourism & Planning

Biography
Contact
Publications
Projects
Teaching

Biography

I am an Italian-born, University College London-educated cultural citizenship activist and heritage scholar, and my main area of interest lies in the multiple and complex ways that people make place through memory and the imagination. I explore the ways in which communities and individuals make themselves at home in the world through storytelling practices. I work with the ideas of memory and the senses, emotion and perception to enable bottom-up senses of place and senses of the past to come to the fore. To do so, I love conducting participatory, community-led mapping and visualisation practices that create and/or channel sense of place from the perspective of locals, stakeholders, activists and non professional scholars.

I have carried out fieldwork in Italy, the United Kingdom and Pakistan.

My current fieldwork is in Sydney and Swat Valley, Pakistan. I am working on creative laboratories on place and belonging with asylum seekers in Sydney (2019-20) and on post-Taliban sense of place in Swat.

Swat Valley is the core of my current and future research. In 2016 I undertook community-participation heritage activities in Naran and Kaghan Valleys with NGO Laajverd Visiting School, and in Swat District wih cultural activists. I have an ongoing partnership with Swat Museum (Saidu Sharif), Sustainable Tourism Foundation Pakistan (STFP) and the Malakand Division of Archaeology Services. In 2020 thanks to funding from the British Academy I will carry out a collaborative mapping project in the area 'mapping the wounded landscape'.

My first monograph, entitled The Poetics of Conflict Experience. Materiality and Embodiment in Second World War Italy (Routledge, 2016) revived the poetics of landscape and conflict perception in Second World War Italy through the prism of materiality, contemporary identity politics, memory, and embodiment. I am the editor-in-chief of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place and of the Routledge Handbook of Community Archaeology.

My new monograph, Visualising Place, Memory and the Imagined, is out on November 2019 on Routledge.

This information has been contributed by Doctor De Nardi.

Qualifications

PhD University College London

Professional Memberships

Development Studies Association of Australia (DSAA) (2019)

Awards

SSAP Researcher Development Fund 2019-10-01

Interests

Mapping
Memory
Displacement
Human trafficking
Material feminism

Organisational Unit (School / Division)

Dean's Unit, School of Social Sciences
Geography, Tourism & Planning

Contact

Email:	S.DeNardi@westernsydney.edu.au
Phone:	(02) 9685 9185
Mobile:
Location:	EI.G.10 Parramatta

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Teaching

Previous Teaching Areas

101900 Working with Communities, 2017
102069 Heritage and Planning, 2019

Publications

Books

De Nardi, S. (2020), 'Visualising Place, Memory and the Imagined', : Routledge 9781138052277.
De Nardi, S., Orange, H., High, S. and Koskinen-Koivisto, E. (2020), 'The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place', : Taylor & Francis 9780815386308.
De Nardi, S. (2017), 'The Poetics of Conflict Experience: Materiality and Embodiment in Second World War Italy', : Routledge 9781472486295.

Chapters in Books

De Nardi, S. (2022), 'Mapping more-than-nostalgia of the 'pits' : heritage co-production as a creative resistance to deindustrialization', Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Macmillan 9783030777074.
De Nardi, S. (2021), 'Memory as a network of affects : bridging the humanities and social sciences to understand the social spaces of storytelling', Bridging Social and Geographical Space through Networks, Sidestone Press 9789464270013.
De Nardi, S. and Drozdzewski, D. (2019), 'Landscape and memory', The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, Routledge 9781138720312.
De Nardi, S. (2017), 'Emplacing the Italian Resistance : the dystopian fight against Fascism and Nazism (1943-1945)', Modern Conflict and the Senses, Routledge 9781138927827.
De Nardi, S. (2016), 'Who were the enemies? : the spatial practices of belonging and exclusion in Second World War Italy', Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict, Routledge 9781138923218.
De Nardi, S. (2013), 'How natural are natural places? : challenging stereotypes in the interpretation of landscape in Iron Age Veneto, Italy', Place as Material Culture: Objects, Geographies and the Construction of Time, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 9781443842617.
De Nardi, S. (2011), 'A journey through 'hidden' or forgotten landscapes in the northern Veneto : patterns and biases in material culture and research methods', Hidden Landscapes of Mediterranean Europe: Cultural and Methodological Biases in Pre- and Protohistoric Landscape Studies: Proceedings of the International Meeting, Siena, Italy, May 25-27, 2007, Archaeopress/British Archaeological Reports 9781407309033.

Journal Articles

De Nardi, S. and Phillips, M. (2022), 'The plight of racialised minorities during a pandemic : migrants and refugees in Italy and Australia', Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, vol 41, no 1 , pp 98 - 111.
De Nardi, S. (2020), 'The materiality of conflict memory : reflections from contemporary Italy', Journal of Material Culture, vol 25, no 4 , pp 447 - 461.
De Nardi, S. (2020), 'Public archaeology in 10 years? : we will hopefully learn to share more, and better', AP: Online Journal in Public Archaeology, vol 10 , pp 75 - 79.
De Nardi, S. (2017), 'Everyday heritage activism in Swat Valley : ethnographic reflections on a politics of hope', Heritage & Society, vol 10, no 3 , pp 237 - 258.
Drozdzewski, D., De Nardi, S. and Waterton, E. (2016), 'Geographies of memory, place and identity : intersections in remembering war and conflict', Geography Compass, vol 10, no 11 , pp 447 - 456.
De Nardi, S. (2015), 'When family and research clash : the role of autobiographical emotion in the production of stories of the Italian civil war, 1943-1945', Emotion, Space and Society, vol 17 , pp 22 - 29.
De Nardi, S. (2015), 'The enemy as confounding other : interpersonal perception and displacement in Italian memories of the Resistance and German occupation of 1943-1945', History and Anthropology, vol 26, no 2 , pp 234 - 254.
De Nardi, S. (2014), 'An embodied approach to Second World War storytelling mementoes : probing beyond the archival into the corporeality of memories of the resistance', Journal of Material Culture, vol 19, no 4 , pp 443 - 464.
De Nardi, S. (2014), ''No-one had asked me about that before' : a focus on the body and 'other' resistance experiences in Italian World War Two storytelling', Oral History, vol 42, no 1 , pp 73 - 83.
De Nardi, S. (2014), 'Senses of place, senses of the past : making experiential maps as part of community heritage fieldwork', Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, vol 1, no 1 , pp 5 - 22.
De Nardi, S. (2007), 'Landscapes of the prehistoric Veneto, Italy : a plurality of local identities reflected in cult and landscape perception', Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, vol 18 , pp 39 - 56.

Conference Papers

De Nardi, S. (2017), 'The invisible materialities of the Italian resistance movement during World War 2', European Association of Archaeologists. Annual Meeting, Maastricht, Netherlands.

Participatory belonging, mapping culture, initiatives that boost agency and foster place-based cultural citizenship. I am interested in situatedness and memory as sharing practices for making sense of place and identities.

I have published extensively on war and post-conflict place perception.

In 2019 I have been awarded British Academy Funding as part of a international team on the project: ‘Mapping the wounded landscape of Swat Valley: from Taliban violence and iconoclasm to social growth and reconciliation’.