Introducing human rights education within a memorial museum framework: the challenges and strategies of Taiwan's National Human Rights Museum

ABSTRACT

Human rights museums have flourished in the postwar era. Within Asia, a number of these museums reflect upon the histories of dictatorship after WWII and memorialize the victims of related human-rights violations. As providing human rights education (HRE) becomes an increasingly important focus of human rights museums, many challenges must be overcome to achieve the dual goals of memorializing victims and implementing HRE. These challenges are particularly complex for museums that have been established on ‘difficult heritage’ sites.

The National Human Rights Museum in Taiwan (NHRM) was selected as a case study to investigate how a museum can balance the dual functions through a consideration of the very naming process of the museum, its curatorial strategies, and its pedagogical orientations. The proposed pedagogy of listening and dialogue, which focuses visitors’ attention on victims’ personal stories and intergenerational dialogue, brings both consolation to survivors and learning opportunities for visitors. This paper argues that in order to fully realize the functions of HRE at NHRM, the meanings of traumatic memories should be explored, testimonies should be linked to an examination of the mechanisms used by the totalitarian regime, and discussions of contemporary human rights issues should be appropriately addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums and human rights education
• pedagogy of listening and dialogue
• strategies for human rights curatorship
• chain of testimony
• National Human Rights Museum
• Taiwan

Acknowledgements

This work is financially supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, under Grant MOST 108-2410-H-119-006. The author is grateful to Professor Jennifer Carter's comments on this paper, as well as to the National Human Rights Museum for its support of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Chia-Li Chen is Professor of the Graduate Institute of Museum Studies at the Taipei National University of the Arts. She is the author of Museums and Cultural Identities: Learning and Recollection in Local Museums in Taiwan (VDM Verlag). Her research interests focus on the representation of the disabled, traumatic memories and human rights education in the museums.

Notes

1 The Political Archive Act was passed by the Legislative Yuan in July, 2019. This Act requires governmental and other institutions that keep political archives dating from 1945 to 1992 to transfer these archives to the National Archives Administration, National Development Council, within the next 6-12 months. These archives will be open to the public. The public access of those archives that are regarded to be a national secret will be specifically considered. If there is a controversy regarding the use of the archive, it will be submitted to a committee that will decide on issues of accessibility. The Act also authorizes those individuals who are the subject of an archive, or those people who are related to these individuals, to apply to add information about their personal case. (National Development Council, 2019; Chen, Chia-Wen 2019). The pass of Political Archive Act, the Transitional Justice Commission considers the passing of the Political Archive Act an important step towards achieving transitional justice in Taiwan. United Newspaper, July 4, 2019. Retrieval from: https://udn.com/news/story/6656/3910054, 2019/10/24.