Commemoration, Pedagogy, and Historical Trauma

The research cluster in Commemoration, Pedagogy and Historical Trauma will broadly explore a range of commemorative-pedagogical forums, remembrance practices and aesthetic interventions, which have been utilized to come to terms with past atrocities. The cluster will also investigate how these forums help forge, however partial and incomplete, a political culture of social justice and historical reckoning. 

Rationale

Given the current spotlight on a legacy of ongoing social and racial injustices across Canada (for example, the discovery of unmarked mass graves of Indigenous children across residential schools), the research cluster seeks to mobilize and develop the varied resources and approaches of commemorative pedagogies for helping us to better think and actively reckon with our traumatic times. In this regard, Anti-Black Racism and Anti-Indigenous Racism work in education will be extended from the conventional purview of the social sciences to broach, develop and consolidate wider and complex lines of engagement at work across the field of memory studies, commemorative pedagogy and aesthetic practices. While looking into the importance of memory and education for defining community, repairing social significance and institutionalizing a more just polity in the aftermath of gross violations, the research cluster will inquire into the pedagogical dynamics that are unleashed through artistic and counter-memorial practices as witnessed in Canada and across the globe. We will foreground artistic and community endeavors that engage with memories of an unsettling and unsettled past, and with the complexities of living in a world and time riddled with political-traumatic violence. This approach will allow us to explore the various political and riddling deployments of traumatic memories and representations as it relates to the teaching and promotion of social justice through public trials, truth commissions, museums, memorial spaces, art exhibits, artistic practices, films and curriculum. The research cluster seeks to cultivate a trans-disciplinary and nuanced approach for engaging issues in commemorative-pedagogies, memory-studies, memorial-art and social-justice. The cluster will thus afford a forum for grappling with the distinction between actuality and representation – memory and documenting history – as it presents a unique set of challenges for theory, for pedagogy and aesthetic practices, weighed against and weighted with profound political, juridical, ethical and pedagogical significance.