Outline of Research Question and Theoretical Framework

In 1966 a coal slurry tip fell onto the Pantglas Junior School and several houses in Aberfan, Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults. On visiting Aberfan, we ask to what extent our experience of the town, the cemetery and the memorial site was informed by, and predicated upon, our earlier engagement with two major creative productions that represented this event, Carl Jenkins’ Cantata Memoria: For the Children, and an  episode of the television series, The Crown. We used process and walking methodologies that involved plugging into the layers of memorialisation and thinking with affect theory to ask how cultural productions facilitate the layering of the memorial experience, thereby shedding light on the affective intensities and entanglements of a memorialisation learning experience.

This paper is in three parts. The first considers Cantata Memoria in a way that identifies those features that spoke to us as a commemorative text before, during and after our visit. The second part explores the Aberfan episode in The Crown and identifies those aspects which both resonated with us and, at the same time, built upon our experience and understanding of the CantataMemoria.  We were forming commemorative layers, not in the physical sense as described by Inall, but in Sumartojo’s experiential sense of ‘the things people do and how they do them’ (Inall, 2020; Sumartojo 2021, 533). The music and the episode provided us with a soundtrack and a visual memory that prompted a visit to Aberfan and helped to construct, manage and shape our affective entanglements of our experience once we arrived. In that sense we argue that the memorial learning process is cumulative, layered and cross dimensional, demonstrating what Sumartojo (2021, 536) refers to as ‘commemoration, as it were, from the inside (as it is taken up in research participants’ experiential worlds) and from the outside (in its representational and discursive forms and expressions), weaving these perspectives together to reach new understandings.’  Waterton (2014, 828) argues that ‘a visitor’s capacity to be affected by heritage is qualified by the experiences inevitably and already encoded in their person, as well as their responses to its already circulating representations. These, in turn, will trigger a range of kinaesthetic senses and flows that act as entry points for the retrieval or (re)emergence of memories in a cycle of affective contagion’. This paper builds on Waterton and Sumartojo to identify what specifically is carried forward, layered and remembered, reconfigured, transformed and experienced. In this paper we identify what Sumartojo and Graves (2021, 236) call a ‘sedimentation of previous experience’ in relation to specific cultural and artistic interpretations. We ask, how Cantata Memoria and The Crown acted in sequence and in tandem, to encourage a visit to Aberfan, and how those artistic renditions informed an affective encounter of the site. What did we learn from them to build our ‘sediments’?

Methodology/Methods. This paper explores learning through affect. Affect is that sensation that precedes emotion and might be encountered through goose bumps, a shiver up the spine, a tingle, a slump, a heavy heart or tight chest. These affective intensities are often embodied but might also be a niggling feeling or something you half catch out of the corner of the eye. Thrift describes affect as ‘merging “the social” and “the biological”’ and Waterton refers to being ‘bodily interrupted’ (Thrift, 2009, 81; Waterton 2014, 823). Affect is also active, moving between and amongst, in and around bodies culminating perhaps in Thrift’s idea of ‘affective contagion’ (Thrift 2009, 88; Waterton, 2014, 829). It is fast, reactive, unpredictable, pre-thought, pre-planned, ‘involuntary and precognitive’ (Thrift 2009, 91). We are alert to the ways in which affective flows entangle us through memories, stories, soundscapes and the vitality of matter. The entanglement is an active, ongoing process; always in a state of flux. As a result, we think about what this work does in terms of knowledge production. In this research we examine our affective encounters as visitor/researchers at Aberfan who have been cognitively and emotionally prepared by engaging with two major creative products that tell the Aberfan story. ‘Plugging in’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Jackson & Mazzei 2023) is a conducive means for exploring the layers of memorialisation of the Aberfan disaster. Jackson and Mazzei explain plugging in as a means for thinking with the theory, attaining a sense of ‘withness’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 3). We also followed the trajectory of a flow; moving from the music, to the television program and then to a reflective response; the walk through Aberfan itself, plugging in the pieces of story, sound, action, feeling and atmosphere, creating an affective assemblage and with it, the new knowledge born of entanglement. Walking methodologies provided cues for theorising this process. As described by Springgay and Truman (2017, 28), walking methodologies offer a form of inquiry for relational thinking with the body, movement, rhythm, space, and the senses. They allow us to think about the experience as encounters (Jackson and Mazzei 2023, 3) where we are transformed by our entanglements with affective flows, the unknown and the serendipitous.

Conclusions The visit to Aberfan, quiet, unobtrusive, almost apologetically executed was of enormous significance in processing the knowledge created while watching The Crown and listening to Cantata Memoria. By walking the space, experiencing the quiet reflectiveness of the cemetery, noticing the rain, seeing the palpably present anger of other visitors after 50 years, standing in the memorial garden, listening to the unseen local children, seeing the footings of the old school emerging defiantly from behind the memorial wall, looking to the hills, wondering where the coal tips were, hearing the river and talking about these things with each other, we created a layered memorialisation. That layering settled the television story and the music into an educational cartography that could be experienced through the body, by walking, looking, hearing and talking. This learning experience was enhanced by its co-constructed nature. The affective entanglements were amplified by participating in a deeply theoretical conversation and through the sharing of individual responses. As we walked towards the Merthyr Vale bus stop we looked back through the valley aware that we shared a transformational co-constructed commemorative learning experience. We had walked with the people of Aberfan as well as the composers, singers and instrumentalists, the actors and writers, the directors and producers who created the cultural representations of the Aberfan disaster. We left Aberfan with the weight of an affective threshold but also with a deep sense of the enduring significance of what occurred there. We argue for the value of using affect theory in a co-constructed, embodied and cumulative approach to learning in place.

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