ABSTRACT
The field of memory studies tends to focus attention on the ‘3Ms’ – museums, monuments, memorials – as sites where memories are constructed, communicated, and contested. Where education is identified as a site for memory, the focus is often narrowly on what is or is not communicated within curricula or textbooks, assuming that schools simply pass on messages agreed or struggled over elsewhere. This article explores the possibilities opened when educative processes are not taken as stable and authoritative sites for transmitting historical narratives, but instead as spaces of contestation, negotiation and cultural production. With a focus on ‘difficult histories’ of recent conflict and historical injustice, we develop a research agenda for education as a site of memory and show how this can illuminate struggles over dominant historical narratives at various scales, highlighting agencies that educational actors bring to making sense of the past.
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Notes on contributors
Julia Paulson
Julia Paulson is Associate Professor of Education, Peace and Conflict at the University of Bristol, UK.
Nelson Abiti
Nelson Abiti is a Curator at Uganda National Museum.
Julian Bermeo Osorio
Julian Bermeo Osorio is a researcher for the Colombian Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition and formerly led the Pedagogy team at Bogotá's Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation.
Carlos Arturo Charria Hernández
Carlos Arturo Charria Hernández is the Secretary of Education in Cúcuta, Colombia and former Director of Bogota's Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation.
Duong Keo
Duong Keo is a Lecturer in History at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and is a Researcher at the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Centre.
Peter Manning
Peter Manning is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Bath, UK.
Lizzi O. Milligan
Lizzi O. Milligan is a Senior Lecturer in International Education at the University of Bath, UK.
Kate Moles
Kate Moles is a Lecturer in Sociology at Cardiff University, UK.
Catriona Pennell
Catriona Pennell is Associate Professor of Modern History and Memory Studies at the University of Exeter, UK.
Sangar Salih
Sangar Salih is Director of the Peace and Freedom Organisation in Erbil, Iraq.
Kelsey Shanks
Kelsey Shanks is the Global Challenges Research Fund Challenge leader for Education and is a Senior Lecturer at the UNESCO Centre at the University of Ulster, UK.