Autofiction, Post-conflict Narratives, and New Memory Cultures

A reaction against the death of the author provided one context in which autofiction started to develop in the 1970s. The rebuttal of the death of the author has been prominent among postcolonial writers, who, because their voices were historically marginalized until the recent past, are unlikely to accept the tacit silencing that theories of the death of the author might imply. Through a discussion of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s depiction of Nigeria’s Biafran War of 1967–1970 in Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) and Justin Cartwright’s reflection on the massacre of Zulus by Boers in 1838 in Up Against the Night (2015), this chapter shows how they use techniques associated with autofiction to contribute to new forms of memory culture in post-conflict societies.

Intergroup Contact, Intergroup Anxiety, and Attitudes towards the Opposing Group in Divided Society

The negative attitudes and negative emotions play a key role in maintaining the hostilities between the groups of a divided society. Evidence suggests that intergroup contact can improve or worsen intergroup attitudes. The current study examined the mediating role of intergroup anxiety on quantity of interethnic contact and acculturation attitudes and emotional responses to contradictory conflict narratives in a divided society with a background of armed conflict in the past. The study was conducted among 202 Albanians and 239 Serbs in Kosovo. The results indicate that as more as they meet members of the opposing group the less they feel intergroup anxiety and the more they show acculturation attitudes towards the opposing group among both Albanians and Serbs. However, such mediating role of intergroup anxiety was not found on emotional responses to contradictory conflict narratives, except among Serbs who live in certain enclaves. The findings are discussed in terms of context, reconciliation, and maintenance of frozen conflict.

Transforming Conflict Narratives

Narratives, both personal and social, guide how we live and how we are acculturated into our social worlds. As we make changes in our lives, our personal stories change and, in turn, have the potential to influence the social narratives of which we are a part. Likewise, when there are changes in the culture and social worlds around us, that social narrative changes, thereby affecting our personal narratives. In other words, personal and social narratives are strongly linked and mutually influence each other. We may feel and know these transformations take place and understand the ways in which our lives are affected. However, we often struggle to document these shifts. This article suggests using the practical theory, Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) (Pearce, 2007), for narrative analysis to identify and surface personal and social narrative transformations.

From Higher Education in Historic Palestine towards a Pan-Palestinian Higher Education

The fiercely waged, century-long conflict on the ground of historic Palestine between the Jews, who from the mid-nineteenth century have mainly immigrated from Europe, and the Arab Palestinians, who live there—and have been living there for centuries/thousands of years—primarily started in the educational field. With the establishment of the Technion Institute in 1912, the Political Zionist movement started to develop a higher education system (HES) that could deliver the human capital needed for the building of a prosperous state, one built on the occupation and expropriation of Palestinian land and material property, on the expulsion of the people who lived there, on a system of apartheid, and, at long last, on the denial and destruction of the Palestinian identity. It was only sixty years later that a Palestinian response in the field of higher education was in a position to start with the establishment of Hebron University in 1971, followed by over fifty other Palestinian higher education institutes (HEIs). Despite current numerical parity in the population of around 6.5 million each (The New Arab 2018) and the number of HEIs (over fifty each) on the ground of historic Palestine, a devastating multi-sectorial power discrepancy exists in favor of the visions of Political Zionism. The power discrepancy and the irreconcilable narratives developed on both sides render peaceful compromises impossible. Through bibliographic research, this paper provides an outsider’s general snapshot of the current state of higher education in Palestine in order to explore its relation to conflict narratives, to power gap, and to major political events. It presents ideas for an intra-Palestinian, just as a regional and a global, discourse on how the still weak Palestinian HES in the Occupied Palestinian Territory could be improved to further strengthen Palestinian economic and scientific progress. It reflects on how to expand into a pan-Palestinian HES that, in addition, targets Palestinian refugees and diaspora Palestinians from all over the world, as well as Palestinians living in Israel. Beyond this demographic expansion, this essay suggests an academic engagement with the strengthening of historic Palestinian identity and the restitution of its cultural Druze and Jewish components, which were lost during the last century of conflict. This strengthened renewed multi-religious (now multilingual) Palestinian identity can also offer a long-term perspective for a peaceful solution, a perspective which cannot be offered by the exclusive Political Zionism.

Conflicts and complexities: Medical science, exceptional experiences, and the perils of simplistic history

Despite ongoing polemical debates over the supposedly inherent opposition between science and religion, the current consensus in professional historical scholarship is that sweeping conflict narratives do not stand up to scrutiny. Where previous generations of historians of science and medicine often assumed intrinsic conflict, more recent investigations have instead demonstrated vast complexities. This chapter illustrates responses to exceptional or spiritual experiences from the Enlightenment to the professionalization of modern psychology. Noting recent clinical attention to spontaneous and psychedelically induced spiritual and mystical experiences, it concludes by considering the ongoing repercussions of outdated historical frameworks on scientific and medical practice and research.

Cross-communal acts of commemoration designed to promote peace at a local level in Bosnia-Herzegovina

This essay describes two distinct senses in which local remembrance activities are used to build peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina: to counter nationalist conflict narratives and to demonstrate cross-communal recognition on the local level. The existing literature on such activism in Bosnia-Herzegovina foregrounds the objective conditions in which the combination of memory activism and peacebuilding is necessary as a counter to the uses made of remembrance by the main ethnonationalist parties to justify their divisive rule. The article draws on the concepts of Michael Rothberg�multidirectional memory and implicated subjectivity�to show how the divergent forms of local peacebuilding and memory activities imply choices which also have a subjective, relational element. To enable the reader to understand these choices, the article first reviews the historical, political, and social conditions faced by activists. Secondly, it explores ways in which the subjective, relational dimensions of these choices are also keys to understanding ways in which their variety and their engagement with local realities are not captured in objectivising literature on peacebuilding and memory work.

Dual Processing of Moral Conflicts in Media Entertainment and Their Effect on Moral Judgement and Moral Reasoning

Moral conflict occurs readily in everyday life. Rarely are moral decisions without some ambiguity. In part because moral conflict is so prevalent in life and in part because it seems to be intrinsically absorbing, moral conflict is often present in narrative entertainment as well. Prior research has used a dual-system model of cognitive processing to examine media narratives and has found that moral conflict results in more reflective and systematic processing. However, the research to date leaves several unanswered questions regarding how moral conflict narratives are processed and how that processing influences moral judgement and moral reasoning. Therefore, we utilize a moral conflict manipulation and a cognitive load experimental paradigm in two separate studies to specifically explore how 1) different cognitive processing systems are used to understand moral conflict narratives, and 2) how moral conflict then can influence moral judgement and moral reasoning. Results of these studies point to the fact that moral conflict is processed through a dual system but that these systems likely operate on different aspects of the narrative: we judge quickly and intuitively, and we reason slowly, offering complex reasons. Overriding our cognitive capacity, however, may result in a diminished ability to see moral complexity.