2021-2022 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2021-2022 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HGS 268 - Special Topics in Genocide


Special topics vary by semester and by instructor.

May be repeated for credit

FALL 2021- PROMISING PEDAGOGY: TEACHING ABOUT ATROCITY IN THE AGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS 

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

It is often assumed that teaching about the Holocaust or other forms of mass violence will have transformative effects. This lecture course explores the promise of pedagogy after atrocity and asks what exactly is promised? What is the intervention of pedagogy after disruptive violence? The lecture course frames these educational efforts in a discourse of human rights and starts from a paradox: The Holocaust is present as public memory, taught and known in unprecedented ways, yet mass atrocity and even genocide have proliferated on a global scale. What is the role and function of education, specifically normative pedagogy, in mitigating, preventing, overcoming and surviving atrocity? What can teaching about the Holocaust, genocide and other atrocities achieve in safeguarding human rights? How are human rights formulated in societies that are embedded in nation-state politics and ongoing production of nationalism? Concretely, how does the work of education support human rights and how does this look in any specific context after very specific crimes?

 

Keeping these larger questions in mind this lecture course will interrogate key concepts such as “human rights” “critical and decolonial pedagogy,” “re-education,” “policing,” “race,” “human,” “formal and informal education,” and “agency and performativity” as fundamental for our understanding of how pedagogy after atrocity works. This lecture course is divided into three main parts and will take students on a multidisciplinary global journey starting with the Global North (Germany, US, Canada) and traversing through the Global South (Iraq, Rwanda, Darfur) and back. By doing so, it will survey different national contexts in their cultural and historical specificity as they are embedded in a globalized discourse of human rights and genocide prevention.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies