This international symposium explores the ethical and practical challenges of effectively communicating traumatic pasts to public audiences.

This international symposium explores the ethical and practical challenges of effectively communicating traumatic pasts to public audiences. It brings together leading scholars and practitioners from Europe and North America to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to interrogate the challenges facing historians, artists and museum professionals as they seek to address difficult or traumatic pasts in various contexts.

The theme of the program is the ethics and aesthetics of the study and communication of difficult pasts. Specifically, how can these stories be related accurately, sensitively, and ethically; are there methodologies or styles of writing and art that are particularly appropriate when it comes to responding to atrocity; and how do we support archivists, curators, researchers, and artists who engage in sharing and documenting traumatic pasts?

Monday 5 October (QUB Main Campus)

16.00 – 17.00 Keynote Lecture. Professor Jane Ohlmeyer (Trinity College Dublin) Dealing with Difficult Archives: the 1641 Depositions and the weaponizing of history

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Tuesday 6 October (Riddell Hall Stranmillis Road)

09:00 Registration, tea and coffee

09:30-11:00 Creative Approaches to Difficult Pasts

Chair: Robert M. Ehrenreich (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Temi Odumosu (University of Washington). To Be in Conversation with Difficult Images

Alexandra Drakakis (9/11 Memorial Museum). Feathers of the Phoenix: Childhood Grief, Collaborative Art, and Memory After 9/11

Paula Kolar (Holocaust Centre North). ‘How do I touch this?’ Memorial Gestures at Holocaust Centre North

11:30-13:00 Telling Difficult Histories

Chair: Sean O’Connell (QUB)

Jennifer Geddes (University of Virginia): Costly Narratives and Painful Knowledge: Giving and Receiving Holocaust Testimonies.

Jason Young (University of Michigan). Crossties: A Story of Race and Place in the US South.

Azir Osmanović (Srebrenica Memorial Center, Potočari): Living the Past, Curating the Trauma: From Survivor to Custodian of Memory in Srebrenica.

13:45- 15:15 Recovering Lost Voices

Chair: Kath Stevenson (QUB)

Tatiana Vagramenko (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). The Archive as Weapon: Soviet Afterlives and Memory Wars in Ukraine

Anne Gilliland (UCLA). ‘Metadata Markers, Imaginaries and Fabulations’.

Caroline Sturdy Colls (University of Huddersfield). In the Ground, On the Walls and in the Archive: Recovering Lost Voices at the Trawniki Camps.

15:30 – 17:00 Creating Access to Memory

Chair: Maurice Casey (QUB)

Rebecca Jinks (Royal Holloway). “Just write my name as E.Q.”: Collecting and Archiving Yezidi Women Survivors’ Testimonies

Jennie Williams (Kinfolkology). The Descendants Forum: From Shared Histories to Collective Action

Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library). A Teleology of Ethical Progress? Archiving and Curating Testimony at the Wiener Holocaust Library, Then and Now.

The conference is organized in collaboration with the UCLA Library Modern Endangered Archives Program, the University of Virginia’s Jewish Studies Program, the Centre of Archaeology, University of Huddersfield and the Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan.

Description supplied by the event organiser.