CONFRONTING DENIAL: HOW DO MUSEUMS DEAL WITH GENOCIDES?
29 October 2021
16:00-18:00 (Bangkok/Phnom Penh) / 15:30-17:30 (Yangon) / 12:00-14:00 (Moscow) / 11:00-13:00 (Warsaw)
Please join the next meeting ‘Confronting Denial: How Do Museums Deal with Genocides?’ in the series of online meetings for museums, memorial sites, and civil society within the project entitled ‘Identifying and countering Holocaust distortion. Lessons for and from Southeast Asia’ organised by the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association and supported by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and Heinrich Boell Stiftung Cambodia. The meeting will be organised in cooperation with the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow.
During the meeting, we will discuss what are the forms and ways of dealing with the past, curating difficult knowledge, and what can be the role for museums to represent these difficult stories. How can museums advance and promote a culture of peace and prevent future atrocities? What can be the role of museums in countering forgetting and genocide distortion and denial? During the session, we will learn interesting examples from different contexts from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Russia, and South Africa, and discuss common challenges.
Please register here: https://lnkd.in/dnEphgPN
Our guest speakers will be:
- Tali Nates, founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and chair of the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation. She is a historian who lectures internationally on Holocaust education, genocide prevention, reconciliation, and human rights. Tali has presented at many conferences including at the United Nations in New York (2016) and is a fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar (2014-2020). She published many articles and contributed chapters to different books, among them ‘God’, ‘Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors’ (2015) and ‘Remembering The Holocaust in Educational Settings’ (2018). Tali serves on the Academic Advisory Group of the School of Social and Health Sciences, Monash University (IIEMSA), South Africa. Born to a family of Holocaust survivors, Tali’s father and uncle were saved by Oskar Schindler,
- Patporn Phoothong (Aor), researcher focusing on peace education via peace museums and archives. Her current research is a feasibility study for the establishment of a peace museum connected to the deep south of Thailand. She co-founded an initiative to establish a ‘6 October 1976 Massacre Museum. Aor is also a working team member for the Documentation of October 6, archives on the Thammasat University massacre on October 6, 1976. Her focus has been on using museums and archives as a tool for conflict transformation and peacebuilding.Besides, Aor is an amateur documentary filmmaker, archivist and curator trainee. Her documentary films illustrate how the victim’s families of state violence have been though, aiming to encourage the audiences to question and confront the culture of impunity in Thailand. Aor was an Asian Public Intellectual, Nippon Foundation’s fellow to Japan and Philippines in 2011-2012 for her research on Towards Peace and Reconciliation: Case Studies of Peace Museums in Japan and the Philippines. She holds a Masters in Inter-Asia NGOs Studies from Sungkonghoe University in Seoul and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from Thammasat University in Bangkok,
- Soth Plai Ngarm, Cambodian peace activist and researcher who holds a Masters degree in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford, UK. Having worked throughout South East Asia on post-conflict issues, nationalism, and ethnic identity, Ngarm has accrued vast experience in the field as a peacebuilder, facilitator, and researcher. Ngarm is the co-author of Introduction to Peace Studies & Research Methods (ACT, 1996), a member of the Applied Conflict Transformation Studies (ACTS) MA programme, and is the Cambodian National Coordinator of the South East Asian Conflict Studies Network (SEACSN). He is also a founding member and former director of the Cambodian-based NGO Alliance for Conflict Transformation (ACT). He is the visionary founder of the Cambodia Peace Gallery in Battambang, which is a new space for learning, sharing and reflecting on Cambodia's journey from war towards peace,
- Khet Long, co-founder of Youth for Peace (YFP) founded in 1999. He has more than a decade of experience in the areas of peacebuilding, conflict transformation, community development, memorialization, youth and community empowerment, and transitional justice. He has been instrumental in the development of the peacebuilding, leadership, memory and reconciliation programs for young people and communities in post conflict Cambodia. He obtained a master degree in applied Conflict Transformation. He conducted his action research on Initiating a Way to Address Legacy of Memory in Cambodia which describes the initial process for consultation to identify a way for development of memory initiatives in the Cambodian local context focusing on engagement across generations where Cambodian’s context has not seen any such sustained local initiated efforts to address the ‘Legacy of Memory’. He has also been involved in the Peace Education Research project in Cambodia as well as many other studies and evaluations for CSOs and NGOs in Cambodia plus other engagements in regional peace and community memory initiatives. He has more than 20 years’ experience of working with a broad range of civil society actors in Cambodia and the regions. Currently, he is an executive director of the Peace Institute of Cambodia,
- Mofidul Hoque is a Bangladeshi researcher, publisher and essayist. He is one of the founder trustees of the Bangladesh Liberation War Museum. He is the Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice of the museum. In the past, he organised six international conferences on Bangladesh Genocide and Justice. He participated in many international events to highlight Bangladesh Genocide and its recognition. At present, he and the CSGS are actively pursuing the cause of justice for the persecuted Rohingya minority. He is a recipient of numerous awards such as Bangla Academy Literary Award (2013) for essays, Ekushey Padak (2016) and Shaheed Altaf Mahmud Medal,
- Anastasia Deka is a historian, who studies Russian history in the 20th century, museum pedagogy, cultural history of Russia, imagology, and history of the Russian avant-garde art. Currently, she works at the Research Center of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (Moscow). She is also a museum guide at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (Moscow) and at the GULAG History Museum (Moscow). She is a lecturer of history of Russian art in the 20th century at the Higher School of Economics.
Moderators:
- Alena Fomenko works at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. As a content manager at the museum’s Research Center, she is engaged in developing and updating interactive objects for the core exhibition. She is also a methodologist, curator, and educator of the museum’s School of Guides. For the School of Guides, Alena lectures on the situation of Soviet Jews in the first years after World War II and the emergence of the anti-Jewish policy of the USSR in the last decade of Stalin’s rule,
- Sayana Ser - born in Phnom Penh to parents of Javanese and Cham descents, Sayana Ser grew up listening to her family’s stories of the suffering inflicted on them and other Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. She lost three of her grandparents and many other relatives during the regime. As a young girl in the early 1990s, Sayana often spent the night covering in fear with her family in an underground shelter her father had dug beneath their home on the outskirts of this capital city, while then the marauding bands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas battled it out with government forces. Sayana started working for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) in 1997 as a volunteer and has compiled an extensive collection of poems, songs, and slogans of the Khmer Rouge. She has also assisted in the production of DC-Cam’s magazine Searching for the truth, which has been distributed to villages around the country. She obtained a master degree from Wageningen University, the Netherlands in 2006. Sayana has worked on museum exhibitions and history classroom at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museaum, performing arts with survivor artists and students, documentary films and radio program, teacher training on history of Democratic Kampuchea, and genocide educational tour program. She translated ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ into Khmer language.
- Natalia Sineaeva-Pankowska of the ‘NEVER AGAIN’ Association.
