By Nicola Mathieson, Audrey Gagnon, and Ashton Kingdon
In June 2025, C-REX and VOX-Pol hosted the second edition of the PhD Summer School ‘Studying Online Far-Right Extremism: Methods, Personal Safety, and Ethics’, organised by Audrey Gagnon (University of Ottawa) and Nicola Mathieson (University of Liverpool).
In addition to lectures on qualitative and quantitative approaches to researching online far-right extremism, strategies for ensuring emotional and physical safety, and ethical issues when conducting research on extremism online, the program included a visit to memorial sites of the 22 July, 2011 attacks. On this date, 77 people were killed in two terrorist attacks by a far-right extremist who radicalised online: the first attack was at the government quarter in Oslo city centre and the second at a Workers’ Youth League (AUF) summer camp on the island of Utøya.
As all participants in the summer school study online elements of extremism, we thought it essential to highlight the connection between the online sphere and the offline harm caused by far-right extremism. During the two editions of the Summer School, two memorial sites were visited: Utøya and the 22 July Centre.
While there is a growing literature in memory studies on the purpose and impact of memorials, there is little discussion about the importance of researchers visiting memorial sites. In this blog post, we explore the literature on memorialisation and the impact of visiting memorials, discuss the development of memorials for the 22 July attacks, and reflect on our visit to the 22 July Centre as part of this year’s summer school, in collaboration with Asthon Kingdon (University of Southampton), who attended the visit with us as one of the lecturers.
Memorialisation: Purposes and Impact
Memorials are intended to create a collective memory of significant events and to commemorate their importance for those affected. As noted by Ladino, “(m)ost are meant to be redemptive in some way: to confront loss, trauma, or violence; to provide healing for those involved; and, sometimes, to promote justice for the victims.” To achieve this complex set of aims, there has been a well recognised shift from monuments—often figurative, depicting national heroes that can be viewed from a distance—to experiential approaches focused on engagement from visitors on a sensory or emotional level.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., designed by Maya Lin, is credited as the first of these experiential memorials, or ‘counter-memorials,’ using a reflective surface on its walls to mirror the visitor and facilitating the movement of visitors through the memorial rather than viewing it from the outside. This style of memorial is now common with prominent examples including the Memorial to Murdered Jews in Europe in Berlin with its abstract concrete slabs and sloping passageways and the 9/11 memorial in New York featuring two descending memorial pools.
The exact meaning of these memorials is open to interpretation by the visitor and encourages emotion, engagement, and meaning-making at the individual level. However, to complement the more abstract representations of events in the memorials, these sites have onsite museums that provide verified account of the events and those affected. These museums are often designed to ‘inoculate’ visitors against the repetition of such events. Webber aptly summarises the dual function as a site of remembrance and education: ‘Every memorial site can and should (also) be a site of teaching and learning.’ Common themes driving this educational process—especially at sites of traumatic events—are democracy, human rights, and peace.
While visiting sites of memorialisation is a common practice within educational settings (see for example the role of Holocaust education and visits to concentration camps throughout Europe), and studied through tourism and the impact on visitors, almost no work exists on the importance or impact of visiting as scholars or practitioners. As experts and researchers on the far right, our focus is often on motivations, radicalisation pathways, ideology, and prevention rather than the study of memorialisation and how these memorials—and their contestations—make meaning of terrorist and extremist violence (but see Veilleux-Lepage and de Roy van Zuijdewijn).
Consequently, our focus is on the why, the how, and the who, typically from the perspective of the perpetrator. Our scholarship rarely emphasises or features the names of individual victims or survivors, often rendering them as numbers or members of a collective group. Much of the research on the far-right online connects with the events and perpetrator of 22 July—through references in manifestos, gamification, or depictions as a saint. By visiting the memorial sites, we hope to give our participants the opportunity to connect with the individual and societal harm that is sometimes abstracted in research.
22 July Memorial Sites
Although the construction of 22 July memorials is well documented, we provide a brief overview of those situated on the island of Utøya and of the 22 July Center and we discuss the contestation of memorial sites before reflecting on our visits.
The island of Utøya is owned by the AUF, the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League. On 22 July 2011, there were 564 people on Utøya, mostly young campers. During the terrorist attack, 69 people, mostly children and young adults, were killed. The memorial site on Utøya was created in close collaboration with those affected by the attacks and is oriented toward learning, remembering, sharing and discussing, with an emphasis on safeguarding democracy.
There are two main memorials on the island. The first is the Hegnhuset that encompasses the retained parts of the Café building where 13 young people were killed. Hegnhuset is made of 69 pillars to represent each person killed on the island and is surrounded by 495 exterior pillars that represent survivors. Within the building is a learning space dedicated to democracy, as well as a timeline of the attack that includes text messages sent from the island. The second is the Lysningen, or ‘the clearing’, where a large metal circle is suspended from trees with the names of each victim inscribed. The location of this memorial was chosen as no one was killed or harmed on that part of the island.
The 22 July Center is a commemoration and learning centre that documents and disseminates knowledge about the terrorist attacks. It was originally set up as a temporary information center near the site of the bombing in Oslo city center but became a permanent site in 2015. In addition to the exhibition and learning centre, the centre includes a Room of Remembrance, including photos of each victim of the attack. Lena Fahre, Director, described the centre as a memorial museum by combining commemoration and learning at a memorial site. The center has drawn on Holocaust education, as well as how the US teaches the events of September 11, 2001, to build teaching resources and programmes for pupils to talk about 22 July and its relevance to Norwegian society today.
Contestation of Memorial Sites
When addressing memory and memorialisation, it is important to highlight that these can be sites of contestation. As Sandvik and Vestad ask when discussing the memorialisation of 22 July: ‘How do we continue to remember events that impact the collective while also recognizing the deeply personal and individual forms of trauma and grief?’ The construction of memorial sites was contested by some victims and their families, as well as local communities, many of whom had rescued people from Utøya during the attack.
The most notable contestation was over the design of a memorial proposed on Sørbråten (the peninsula on the mainland that faces Utøya) titled ‘Memory Wound.’ The proposed design would remove a slice of land from the peninsula. Some local residents expressed concerns about the impact the memorial would have on their mental health as a daily reminder of the attack and felt excluded from the consultation process. The design itself was also criticised as an act of violence committed against nature and there were concerns that the memorial would encourage “terror tourism” to Hole. Plans for the memorial were scrapped in 2016 after litigation.
Reflections on the Role of Memorial Visits for Researchers
For researchers investigating far-right extremism online, we hope that memorial visits can serve as a reminder that online far-right extremism can lead to tragic consequences offline. Completing online research may create a disconnect from the real-world harm caused by right-wing terrorist attacks, as violent discourse is analysed from a distance. More specifically, we argue that memorial visits can provide researchers with three key insights.
First, while scholars understand democracy and human rights intellectually, experiential encounters with memorialised trauma can transform how they frame research problems – moving from what causes radicalisation to how we prevent such harm. Memorial visits can help them recognise when their work inadvertently centres perpetrator narratives over victim experiences.
Second, for extremism researchers who regularly consume violent content, memorials provide crucial emotional grounding that can prevent desensitisation and maintain ethical sensitivity in their work. Exposure to memorial spaces can help researchers better understand the long-term societal impacts of their research subjects’ actions. Memorial visits can, furthermore, reinforce the researcher’s responsibility to communities affected by extremism, not just academic audiences.
Third, memorials force confrontation with the impossibility of true objectivity when studying violence; scholars must acknowledge their emotional responses as part of the analytical process. This experience can thus help researchers understand how their work might be received by affected communities, leading to more responsible scholarship. Understanding how societies choose to remember and teach about extremist violence can inform research on prevention and counter-narratives. Memorial visits can also help researchers better understand the ‘aftermath’ dimension of extremism – how communities rebuild, remember, and resist.
In the case of visiting memorial sites in Norway, it allowed us to understand how the country, as a society, has chosen to respond to the tragedy with ‘more openness, more democracy, more humanity, but never naivety.’
Our Experiences Visiting 22 July Memorial Sites
Both iterations of the Studying Online Violent Extremism summer school included a visit to a memorial site of the 22 July attacks. The first edition included a visit to Utøya, while the second visited the 22 July Centre. The visits to both sites were profoundly moving experiences. On Utøya, we encountered the conflicting emotions of the immense horror and suffering of that day contrasted with the joy of contemporary young people enjoying a summer camp – thus ensuring the purpose of the island was not erased by the events of a single day.
At the learning centre, summer school participants were able to discuss the challenges and strategies of teaching about the events with the centre’s educators as they plan their move back to a permanent location within the new refurbished high rise building where the bombing took place. In what follows, we specifically focus on this year’s visit to the 22 July Centre.
The visit included time in the room of remembrance, which displayed photographs and personal keepsakes of each victim of the Utøya attacks. This space proved particularly impactful for summer school participants in ways that extended beyond typical memorial experience. The individual portraits revealed the victims as real people rather than statistical abstractions – young faces with bright smiles, images from family celebrations, and everyday moments.
For the PhD researchers in the summer school many of whom were similar in age to the victims, the photographs created an immediate and visceral connection that transcended academic analysis. The visual similarity disrupted the comfortable analytical distance that academic training typically maintains between researcher and subject matter. The faces looking back from the memorial walls were not abstract victims of extremism to be studied, but individuals who shared generational experiences, cultural contexts, and life stages with the researchers themselves.
This personal identification serves a crucial pedagogical function that differs markedly from how non-academic visitors might experience the space. While general visitors might feel sympathy or sadness, the scholars experienced the recognition that their research subjects were not distant others but people from their own demographic cohort. For researchers accustomed to studying extremism through theoretical frameworks and data analysis, seeing themselves reflected in the victims’ faces forces confrontation with the human cost of their research area.
This dimension of the memorial visit highlights why such experiences may be particularly important for scholars in ways that differ from general public education. The professional requirement to maintain analytical objectivity can sometimes create problematic distance from the human impact of extremist violence. When researchers can see themselves in the victims, it becomes much harder to treat extremist attacks as abstract phenomena worthy only of theoretical consideration.
Lessons Learnt
As organisers, we have also learnt important lessons about how to incorporate memorial site visits into the program more thoughtfully. We are extremely grateful to our summer school participants for sharing their experiences with us and showing us grace as we learnt how to better manage the return from those visits. Drawing on memory studies literature on the impact of memorial sites, it is important to reflect on the fact that you cannot anticipate or dictate the emotional responses of visitors at memorial sites. It is also important to consider the different impact of memorial visits for those who have proximity to events.
Within the program, we have also learned that the timing of the visit is important. In the first summer school, we scheduled the visit to Utøya on the final day for logistical and timetabling reasons. However, this also meant that we did not have an appropriate space on return to Oslo to decompress and debrief about the visit. In this year’s summer school, we made sure to schedule the visit to the 22 July Center in the middle of the program so there were multiple days for participants to discuss any feelings that they had. We also organised an optional group coffee after the visit so that those who wished could share their experiences or be in the company of others. Our approach to supporting students during and after memorial visits is an ongoing subject for improvement, guided by best practice recommendations.
Best Practice Recommendations for Post-Memorial Visit Support
- Brief participants beforehand on common emotional responses, coping strategies, and available support resources, while conducting private individual risk assessments regarding personal trauma history that might be triggered;
- Ensure flexible participation policies allowing participants to opt out of memorial visits or leave early without explanation, and have contact information readily available for counselling services both locally and in participants’ home locations;
- Schedule memorial visits in the middle of programs rather than at the end to allow adequate processing time, and build in 30-60 minutes of structured transition activities to avoid immediately returning to regular programming;
- Normalise unexpected emotional responses such as confusion, anger, numbness, or overwhelming sadness, and implement simple physical grounding techniques to address potential dissociative responses;
- Organise debriefing sessions or optional group activities immediately after the visit for those who wish to share experiences or seek companionship. If needed, peer support pairings can be established to match participants with similar responses or complementary processing styles;
- Organise academic integration discussions to understand how memorial visits affect participants’ ability to engage with research materials and reflect on how the experience might influence research approaches;
- Help participants develop concrete ways to honour their learning through changed methodologies or research questions, and support professional development planning discussions about career and research focus implications;
- Accommodate different cultural processing styles and help participants navigate conflicts between academic training emphasising critical distance and human responses to memorialised trauma, while maintaining focus on learning and professional development rather than voyeuristic interest to avoid ‘trauma tourism’ dynamics.
We hope these recommendations will assist other scholars organising memorial visits in supporting participants during such events. To conclude, we would like to express our immense gratitude to the staff at Utøya and 22 July Center for allowing us to visit and sharing their expertise with us.
This is part two of a two part series from the C-REX and VOX-Pol Summer School 2025. Find out more about the Summer School here.
Audrey Gagnon is an Assistant Professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and affiliated to C-REX.
Nicola Mathieson is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Liverpool, UK.
Ashton Kingdon is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Southampton, UK.