European Contested Heritage & the Politics of Commemoration
Including Masterclass: Competing Memories. European Cultural Heritage of War and Conflict
Date: 25 April 2016 (Masterclass) & 30 June/1 July 2016 (Summer School) Note changed dates!
Time: 15:00-18:00 (Masterclass) & 2-day workshop (Summer School)
Venue: University of Amsterdam
Credits: 2 ECTS (Masterclass) & 3 ECTS (Summer School)
Open to: PhDs & ReMa students
Fee (non-members): 200 EUR
Coordinated by: Prof. Rob van der Laarse & Dr. Ihab Saloul
Register here
The Summer School is fully booked, please send us an e-mail with your name, university and research school. We will put you on our waiting list.
Description & Themes
After 9/11 the ‘War on Terror’ peaked on the international political agenda. However the standard measure still is the Nazi-terror during World War II, as is shown in the so called Stockholm-declaration (2000) which laid the foundation for the consensus between western political leaders for the acknowledgement of the Holocaust as the basis for postwar human rights. But how deep is this consensus? In many new EU-nations which entered in 2004, the iconic status of Auschwitz competes with other ‘traumascapes’ and ‘terrorscapes’ that refer to their postwar communist ‘occupations’ from before 1989 and ethnic conflicts such as in former Yugoslavia. This asks for the need for a fundamental revision of European cultural heritage of war and conflict in general (origins and afterlives of Europe’s ‘Age of Extremes’, Hobsbawm). Key questions and themes include, but not limited to:
- How do ‘competing memories’ relate within European space, and which memory wars are being fought on specific sites and places?
- How does Europe’s cultural heritage of war and conflict (re-)shape our current understanding of the continent?
- What are the effects of the integration process on European cultural diversity, and how has the disappearance of internal European borders challenge contemporary notions of heritage, memory and identity