Remembering Historical Victimization:
Perceived consequences for Victim, Perpetrator, and Third-Party Groups
Prof. Dr. Nyla Branscombe
Pioneer in social psychological approaches to history based collective emotions
Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, US
History, especially that involving human suffering, is neither neutral nor confined to the past. The meaning of history is often hotly debated and revised across time, as is its implications for present intergroup conduct. Reminders of victimization tend to be disturbing and can threaten people’s belief in justice. I will present research illustrating how people derive meaning from past suffering and thereby come to expect the descendants of victimized groups, but not perpetrator groups, to be more humanitarian and moral in their treatment of others. When descendants of victimized groups violate third-parties’ expectations of them and instead engage in present-day harm doing toward others, then victim groups will be judged more negatively than harm-doers who lack a victimization history.
Nyla R. Branscombe is Professor of Psychology at University of Kansas, USA. She has published more than 140 articles and chapters, has been twice co-recipient of the Otto Kleinberg prize for research on Intercultural and International Relations, and twice the co-recipient of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology Publication Award. She co-edited the volumes “Collective Guilt: International Perspectives” (2004), “Commemorating Brown: The Social Psychology of Racism and Discrimination” (2007), “Rediscovering Social Identity” (2010), “Handbook of Gender and Psychology” (2013), “Psychology of Change: Life Contexts, Experiences, and Identities” (2015). Professor Branscombe's current research addresses a variety of issues concerning Intergroup Relations from a Social Identity perspective. How people think about groups that have a history of victimization, when and why privileged groups may feel collective guilt for their past harm doing, and the consequences of experiencing discrimination for psychological well-being have been key topics investigated.
https://psych.ku.edu/sites/psych.ku.edu/files/docs/cv/Branscombe%20Vita%202015%20April.pdf
Memorials in Argentina, Germany and Cambodia:
Balancing Memory, Architecture, Politics and Tourism
Dr. Brigitte Sion
Expert in Performance Studies and Memorial Practices
Associate researcher at the Switzerland Global Studies Institute, University of Geneva, Switzerland
The 21st century has seen a turn in memorial architecture, with a number of states sponsoring national memorials to the victims of mass murder conducted by a previous regime. Such “self-indicting” memorials are analyzed as sites of conflicting performances and as performances themselves, where individual and collective commemorative practices, trendy “starchitecture,” memory politics, death tourism and educational museography coexist and overlap in an emotionally charged space. Using case studies in Argentina, Germany, Cambodia and other places, Brigitte Sion revisits the function of national memorials, assesses their success, and offers an interdisciplinary framework for further study.
Brigitte Sion holds a Ph.D in performance studies from New York University. She has widely lectured and published on commemorative practices in an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective, especially on death tourism, memorial architecture, new rituals and various expressions of collective memory. She is the author, most recently, of Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires: Balancing Memory, Architecture and Tourism and the editor of Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape. She is an associated researcher at the Global Studies Institute at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
The dialogical potentiality of "things".
Heritage as a primary source in history education
Prof. Dr. Maria Grever
Director of the Center for Historical Culture
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
When history teachers today organize trips with their students to a historical museum they may be impressed by the advanced technology, such as large three dimensional and audio-visualized performances, touch screens, interactive historical maps and apps. Nevertheless, objects on display and hands-on activities still fascinate students and other visitors (Grever et al., 2012; De Bruijn, 2014). Perhaps increasingly so as it attracts a "public dissatisfied with simulation" (Huyssen, 1994), longing for "authentic" experiences (Jones, 2010).
The current rehabilitation of material culture (Kopytoff, 1986) offers interesting opportunities to involve tangible heritage as a primary source in history education. The starting point of this trend is not so much the touchable thing as a "permanent reality in stone" but rather the dynamic, intertextual representation. Physical encounters with heritage can stimulate students’ historical imagination and their desire to learn more. On the basis of the historical thinking concept "multiperspectivity" (Seixas & Morton, 2013) I shall discuss how the study of the biography of an object, monument or site offers extra impulses for dialogic learning. In this educational context I approach multiperspectivity from a temporal (vertical) and a social (horizontal) level. With this concept in mind I will briefly analyze two museum representations of World War II / Holocaust in the Netherlands, linked to history teaching.
Maria Grever is professor of Theory and Methodology of History, and director of the Center for Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands). She was program leader of several research projects, such asParadoxes of De-Canonization (2004-06) with Siep Stuurman and Heritage Education, Plurality of Narratives and Shared Historical Knowledge (2009-14) with Carla van Boxtel, both funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Currently she leads the research program War! Popular Culture and European Heritage of Major Armed Conflicts (2015-19). She published co-edited books, (co-authored) monographs - e.g. Transforming the Public Sphere (2004), Beyond the canon (2007) and Verlangen naar tastbaar verleden (2014) - and many bookchapters and articles in journals, e.g. Paedagogica Historica, British Journal of Educational Studies, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Gender & History.
Dr. Gisela Holfter
Professor Bryan Fanning is Social Policy Head of Subject at University College Dublin. He is a leading scholar on the impact of immigration on the Republic of Ireland and has also written extensively on Irish intellectual history.
His books include Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester University Press,2012), Histories of the Irish Future (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Irish Adventures in Nation-Building (Manchester University Press, 2016).
Dr. Gisela Holfter (MA, Washington University, St Louis; PhD, Universität Köln) is Senior Lecturer and Head of the German Section. She is joint founder and director of the Centre for Irish-German Studies at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include Irish-German cultural and historical relations, German literature (19th century to contemporary writing), graduate education, language for specific purposes (especially Business German), exile studies and intercultural studies & preparation for ERASMUS.
She has published numerous articles and written and edited many books, among them Erlebnis Irland – Deutsche Reiseberichte über Irland im 20. Jahrhundert (1996), German-speaking Exiles in Ireland 1933-1945 (ed. 2006), Heinrich Böll and Ireland (2011), The Irish Context of ‘Kristallnacht’ (ed., 2014).