Understanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing and Teaching Genocide (Arts in Action, 1) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552388859 ISBN 13: 9781552388853

Publisher: University of Calgary Press, 2017

Synopsis

Understanding Atrocities is a wide-ranging collection of essays bridging scholarly and community-based efforts to understand and respond to the global, transhistorical problem of genocide. The essays in this volume investigate how evolving, contemporary views on mass atrocity frame and complicate the possibilities for the understanding and prevention of genocide. The contributors ask, among other things, what are the limits of the law, of history, of literature, and of education in understanding and representing genocidal violence? What are the challenges we face in teaching and learning about extreme events such as these, and how does the language we use contribute to or impair what can be taught and learned about genocide? Who gets to decide if it's genocide and who its victims are? And how does the demonization of perpetrators of atrocity prevent us from confronting the complicity of others, or of ourselves? Through a multi-focused and multidisciplinary investigation of these questions, Understanding Atrocities demonstrates the vibrancy and breadth of the contemporary state of genocide studies. With contributions by: Amarnath Amarasingam, Andrew R. Basso, Kristin Burnett, Lori Chambers, Laura Beth Cohen, Travis Hay, Steven Leonard Jacobs, Lorraine Markotic, Sarah Minslow, Donia Mounsef, Adam Muller, Scott W. Murray, Christopher Powell, and Raffi Sarkissian

About this title

About the Author

Scott W. Murray is Associate Professor of History at Mount Royal University. He was a Hess Faculty Fellow in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2015, and a Holocaust Education Foundation Fellow at Northwestern University in 2013. He was also the recipient of the Calgary Jewish Community Award for Holocaust and Human Rights in 2011 and 2013.

Review

Understanding Atrocities helps us to think “about how we think about the past,” and doesn’t offer easy passe-partouts for unlocking or framing humanity’s monstrous history and its representation. Instead, this book provides insightful and necessary roadmaps for our encounters with the demonic events themselves, as well as the vectors and exchanges that process our memory. -Piet Defraeye, University of Alberta, Universiteit Antwerpen

[This book] provides a window into the urgent, complex, and interdisciplinary dialogues underway in Genocide Studies. - Jobb Arnold, Peace Research

Understanding Atrocities is a welcome addition to genocide and atrocities scholarship that introduces new voices, approaches, and topics to a growing global field of research. The well-chosen chapters are perfect illustrations of the breadth and dynamism of contemporary genocide studies. -Andrew Woolford, University of Manitoba, author of “This Benevolent Experiment”: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide and Redress in North America

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1552388859
• ISBN 13: 9781552388853
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Murray Scott W.