HIST 239 - Collective Memory: Society, Culture, Identity and Power

SOAN 239 FDR: SS4 Social Science - Group 4 Distribution
Credits: 3

Why do some places, events, objects, symbols, and individuals become central to understandings of heritage, while others seem ignored or forgotten? How do people use material objects - including landscapes, monuments and artifacts - in negotiations of memory and history, identity and belonging, or debates about good and evil? This course examines cultural, social, political, and economic processes of shared remembrance through case studies from regional, national, and global contexts. We aim to expand understandings of ways that our own society as well as those distant from us in time and space have selectively incorporated their past into the present with an eye to the future. This exploration of collective, contested memory considers heritage tourism, dark tourism, memorialization as witnessing, ethics of remembrance, and relationships between memorialization and power.