Difficult Pasts: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Telling Difficult Histories
About this Event
This international symposium explores the ethical and practical challenges of effectively communicating traumatic pasts to public audiences. It brings together leading scholars and practitioners from Europe and North America to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to interrogate the challenges facing historians, artists and museum professionals as they seek to address difficult or traumatic pasts in various contexts.
The theme of the program is the ethics and aesthetics of the study and communication of difficult pasts. Specifically, how can these stories be related accurately, sensitively, and ethically; are there methodologies or styles of writing and art that are particularly appropriate when it comes to responding to atrocity; and how do we support archivists, curators, researchers, and artists who engage in sharing and documenting traumatic pasts?
Monday 5 October
16.00 – 17.00 Keynote Lecture. Professor Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College Dublin) Dealing with Difficult Archives: the 1641 Depositions and the weaponizing of history
17:00-17:45 Wine Reception (The Senate Room)
18:30 Conference Dinner (The Great Hall)
Tuesday 6 October
09:00 Registration, tea and coffee
09:30-10:45 Creative Approaches to Difficult Pasts
Chair: Robert M. Ehrenreich (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Temi Odumosu (University of Washington). To Be in Conversation with Difficult Images
Alexandra Drakakis (9/11 Memorial Museum). Feathers of the Phoenix: Childhood Grief, Collaborative Art, and Memory After 9/11
Paula Kolar (Holocaust Centre North). ‘How do I touch this?’ Memorial Gestures at Holocaust Centre North
11:00-12:45 Telling Difficult Histories
Chair: Sean O’Connell (QUB)
Jennifer Geddes (University of Virginia): Costly Narratives and Painful Knowledge: Giving and Receiving Holocaust Testimonies.
Jason Young (University of Michigan). Crossties: A Story of Race and Place in the US South.
Azir Osmanović (Srebrenica Memorial Center, Potočari): Living the Past, Curating the Trauma: From Survivor to Custodian of Memory in Srebrenica.
13:30- 14:45 Recovering Lost Voices
Chair: Kath Stevenson (QUB)
Tatiana Vagramenko (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). The Archive as Weapon: Soviet Afterlives and Memory Wars in Ukraine
Anne Gilliland (UCLA). ‘Metadata Markers, Imaginaries and Fabulations’.
Caroline Sturdy Colls (University of Huddersfield). In the Ground, On the Walls and in the Archive: Recovering Lost Voices at the Trawniki Camps.
15:15 – 16:30 Creating Access to Memory
Chair: Maurice Casey (QUB)
Rebecca Jinks (Royal Holloway). “Just write my name as E.Q.”: Collecting and Archiving Yezidi Women Survivors’ Testimonies
Jennie Williams (Kinfolkology). The Descendants Forum: From Shared Histories to Collective Action
Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library). A Teleology of Ethical Progress? Archiving and Curating Testimony at the Wiener Holocaust Library, Then and Now.
The conference is organized in collaboration with the UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program, the University of Virginia’s Jewish Studies Program, the Centre of Archaeology, University of Huddersfield and the Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan.
Keynote
🕑: 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Keynote Lecture, Professor Jane Ohlmeyer
Symposium
🕑: 09:00 AM - 05:00 PM
Symposium
Info: Participants include:Robert M. Ehrenreich (US Holocaust Memorial Museum); Temi Odumosu (University of Washington);
Alexandra Drakakis (9/11 Memorial Museum); Paula Kolar (Holocaust Centre North); Jennifer Geddes (University of Virginia); Jason Young (Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan); Azir Osmanović (Srebrenica Memorial Center, Potočari); Tatiana Vagramenko (Barcelona Supercomputing Center); Anne Gilliland (UCLA); Caroline Sturdy Colls (University of Huddersfield); Rebecca Jinks (Royal Holloway);
Jennie Williams (Kinfolkology); Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library)
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
