ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter explores how geography has engaged with the First World War in recent decades, charting a dynamic relationship between the historical geography of the First World War itself and the emerging geographies of the centennial commemoration of the War. In so doing, it provides an overview the volume’s wider desire to scrutinise practices, processes and channels of commemoration – definitively asking what this means for understanding of the conflict today and beyond. Accordingly, we advocate that such a rethinking and reconceptualisation of sites connected to the conflict can allow for a critical scholarship that consciously dissects interlocking relationships between time and space, thereby questioning the past in relation to its meaning in the present.
