Memory Practices in History Education about the 1947 British India Partition

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meenakshi Chhabra
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
British India ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
History Textbook ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Memory Practices

This article is an epistemological reflection on memory practices in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of collective memories of a historical event involving collective violence and conflict in formal and informal spaces of education. It focuses on the 1947 British India Partition of Punjab. The article engages with multiple memory practices of Partition carried out through personal narrative, interactions between Indian and Pakistani secondary school pupils, history textbook contents, and their enactment in the classroom by teachers. It sheds light on the complex dynamic between collective memory and history education about events of violent conflict, and explores opportunities for and challenges to intercepting hegemonic remembering of a violent past.

scholarly journals Memory Practices and History Education

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicitas Macgilchrist ◽  
Barbara Christophe ◽  
Alexandra Binnenkade
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Community Building ◽  
History Education ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
The Difference ◽  
A Site ◽  
Memory Practices ◽  
Multidirectional Memory ◽  
Point Of Departure

This special issue of the Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society explores memory practices and history education. The first point of departure for the texts collated here is that memory (whichever concept we use from the current range including collective memory, cultural memory, social memory, connected memory, prosthetic memory, multidirectional memory, travelling memory and entangled memory) is a site of political contestation, subject formation, power struggle, knowledge production, and community-building. Our second point of departure is that history education is a site where teachers and pupils as members of distinct generations engage with textbooks and other materials as specific forms of memory texts that guide what should be passed on to the younger generation. As editors, we solicited papers that investigate how what counts as “worth remembering” in a given context is reproduced, negotiated and/or interrupted in classrooms and other educational practices. This introduction aims to sketch the overarching understanding of memory practices which guide the contributions, to point to the purchase of attending explicitly to the “doing” of memory, to highlight the difference between our approach to history education and approaches focusing on historical thinking, and to introduce the six articles.

scholarly journals Editorial

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Dynamic Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
The Mass Media ◽  
The Many ◽  
Memory Practices ◽  
The Way

The medium television has been accused of being amnesiac or a producer of forgetfulness. However, researchers have discovered the many ways the mass media, including television, transform memories and affect not only the way societies remember, but also the way memories must be studied and conceptualized. Collective memories are often seen as institutionalized memories, which we can analyse through official manifestations such as ceremonies, monuments, or even major television programmes. While the texts presented in this issue do not deal with the theory of collective memory, they will suggest various ways of conceptualizing memories, not at the stable, “hard” level of institutions, museums, monuments, but rather at the level of more dynamic memory practices that take place in the contemporary media landscape as an ongoing, active and performative engagement with the past.

CONTEXTUALIZING PALIMPSEST OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN AN URBAN HERITAGE SITE: Case Study of Chahar Bagh, Shiraz - Iran

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Mahmoudi Farahani ◽  
Marzieh Setayesh ◽  
Leila Shokrollahi
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Urban Heritage ◽  
Heritage Site ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
A Site ◽  
Historical Centre

A landscape or site, which has been inhabited for long, consists of layers of history. This history is sometimes reserved in forms of small physical remnants, monuments, memorials, names or collective memories of destruction and reconstruction. In this sense, a site/landscape can be presumed as what Derrida refers to as a “palimpsest”. A palimpsest whose character is identified in a duality between the existing layers of meaning accumulated through time, and the act of erasing them to make room for the new to appear. In this study, the spatial collective memory of the Chahar Bagh site which is located in the historical centre of Shiraz will be investigated as a contextualized palimpsest, with various projects adjacent one another; each conceptualized and constructed within various historical settings; while the site as a heritage is still an active part of the city’s cultural life. Through analysing the different layers of meaning corresponding to these adjacent projects, a number of principals for reading the complexities of similar historical sites can be driven.

Memory Practices in the Classroom

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Ahlrichs ◽  
Katharina Baier ◽  
Barbara Christophe ◽  
Felicitas Macgilchrist ◽  
Patrick Mielke ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Schools ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
History Education ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Past ◽  
Online Videos ◽  
Memory Practices

This article draws on memory studies and media studies to explore how memory practices unfold in schools today. It explores history education as a media- saturated cultural site in which particular social orderings and categorizations emerge as commonsensical and others are contested. Describing vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork in German secondary schools, this article identifies different memory practices as a nexus of pupils, teachers, blackboards, pens, textbooks, and online videos that enacts what counts as worth remembering today: reproduction; destabilization without explicit contestation; and interruption. Exploring mediated memory practices thus highlights an array of (often unintended) ways of making the past present.

scholarly journals Re-living a Common Future in the Face of Ecological Disaster: Exploring (Elements of) Guarani and Kaiowá Collective Memories, Political Imagination, and Critiques

Human Arenas ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Normann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Growth Models ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Green Growth ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Mato Grosso ◽  
Ecological Disaster ◽  
The Face ◽  
Group Interviews

AbstractHow to re-member a fragmented world while climate change escalates, and green growth models reproduce coloniality, particularly in Indigenous territories? What can be the concrete contributions from different scholarly disciplines to a broader decolonial project? These questions are debated by decolonial scholars who call to re-think our practices within academic institutions and in the fields that we study. This article contributes with a decolonial perspective to sociocultural psychology and studies on Indigenous knowledges about climate change. Through ethnographic methods and individual and group interviews, I engage with indigenous Guarani and Kaiowá participants’ knowledges and practices of resilience opposing green growth models in the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul. Their collective memory of a different past, enacted through narratives, rituals, and social practices, was fundamental to imagine different possible futures, which put in motion transformation processes. Their example opens a reflection about the possibilities in connecting sociocultural psychology’s work on collective memory and political imagination to the broader decolonial project, in supporting people’s processes of re-membering in contexts of adverse conditions caused by coloniality and ecological disaster.

KA'KAW POTS AND COMMON CONTAINERS: CREATING HISTORIES AND COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AMONG THE CLASSIC MAYA OF XUNANTUNICH, BELIZE

2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa J. LeCount
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Classic Maya ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Domestic Consumption ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Public Offerings ◽  
Natural Cycles ◽  
Lowland Maya

AbstractReconstruction of foodways at the Lowland Maya center of Xunantunich, Belize, illustrates how commensality is fundamental to the construction of multilayered identities. Collective memory and linear histories form the foundation of identities because they are the mental frameworks people use to construct shared pasts. At Xunantunich, community identity was expressed though pottery and practices associated with the preparation of foods for domestic consumption and public offerings. In a world of natural cycles centered on family reproduction, horticultural activities, and yearly ceremonies, these symbols and rituals structured the lives of all people and embodied within them a collective memory of community. Linear histories were recorded in images and texts on drinking paraphernalia that were likely used for toasting honored individuals, ancestors, or gods during commemorative rites. These inscriptions and bodily practices marked individuals and their houses as people and places of prominence with separate identities.

Memory as State Behaviour

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Kathrin Bachleitner
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Yom Kippur War ◽  
State Behaviour ◽  
Emotional Trigger ◽  
Oil Crisis

This chapter shows how collective memory channels a country’s international behaviour. To that end, it first lays out the nexus between memory and state behaviour put forward by the temporal security concept. It then goes on to distinguish it from international relations’ classical realist and ontological security approaches and their predictions on state behaviour. To keep their temporal security intact, countries are assumed to enter into an ‘in-between-time’ conversation with their ‘significant historical others’. Through the emotional trigger of shame, policymakers avoid potential disconnects with their country’s ‘narrated self in the past’, thus bringing their courses of action in line with collective memory. To illustrate this process, the empirical case study looks at the reaction of West Germany and Austria to two wars in the Middle East. It contrasts their support for either of the warring parties during the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War and international oil crisis of 1973. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that West Germany and Austria’s different collective memories of the Nazi legacy channelled their behaviour along diverse reasonings to support either the Israeli or the Arab side.

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