Tragedy, Trauma, and Teaching: Educating About Genocide

Catalog description

Trauma is a veil through which our understanding of the tragic past is always filtered. Whether it be by virtue of the survivor telling their story through the faulty yet heroic act of remembrance, or the historian piecing together elements of the never-ending puzzle, a full, complete, and objective history is essentially impossible. Yet as we teach about mass atrocity, however messy and difficult that may be, we can garner exceptional insights about the present, the future, and our place in it. These insights are accentuated when we lean into an examination of the interval between the event and our understanding of it. In this course, we will investigate how trauma theory, memory studies, and public history can inform our educational practice in the classroom. We will also encounter multiple examples of genocide and its representation in order to survey the landscape of this history.