Reading Mediated Identities: Auto/biographical Agency in the Material Book, Museum Space, Social Media Platforms, and Archives

Ph.D

The Past and the Future of Holocaust Research: From Disparate Sources to an Integrated European Holocaust Research Infrastructure

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) has been set up by the European Union to create a sustainable complex of services for researchers. EHRI will bring together information about dispersed collections, based on currently more than 20 partner organisations in 13 countries and many other archives. EHRI, which brings together historians, archivists and specialists in digital humanities, strives to develop innovative on-line tools for finding, researching and sharing knowledge about the Holocaust. While connecting information about Holocaust collections, it strives to create tools and approaches applicable to other digital archival projects. The paper describes its current progress and collaboration across the disciplines involved

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory in the Age of Social Media

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study demonstrates that social media was a form of memory. The photo-based platforms of Flickr and Instagram helped better visualize it: the photographs on these sites were literally and figuratively “filtered.” Users had the ability to select a black and white filter, or ones that lightened or darkened the photographs. Digital cameras and smartphones allowed users to take as many photos as they liked and upload the photo(s) they wished. Figuratively speaking, people chose to present certain parts of their visits on social media platforms. They filtered their experiences and chose the part of their story they wanted to tell. Building from the varied fields of memory studies, history of the Holocaust, visual culture, dark tourism, and public history, this study demonstrates that social media is a digital archive that historians must consider when writing about historical memory in the twenty-first century

The Aryan- and Polish-Passing Women and Girl Couriers of the Jewish Resistance Movements in Nazi-Occupied Poland

In the fight against Nazi occupation, underground Jewish movements in Polish ghettos sought to mount resistances through illegal educational and cultural activity, trafficking individuals and families to safety, and armed resistance. Key to these effort

Reimagining racism: It\u27s more than Black & white

Human beings have a set of core needs and inalienable rights. Implicit to such needs and rights are concepts of potential – to become what we are able to become – and dignity – to be regarded and treated as equal. Clearly, these aspirational tenets are still not realizable for many of our fellow beings, both locally and globally. For example, from the standpoint of this dissertation, racial injustice (e.g., racism, hate crimes, discriminatory laws and policies, genocide) has – historically and currently – led to transgenerational trauma and otherizing within communities that are marginalized at multiple levels of analysis. As will be well documented, evidence from the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI) – a comprehensive and mixed methods measure in development since the early 1990s – empirically and theoretically illuminates the importance of understanding the etiology of one’s beliefs and values as well as why we humans advance actions, policies, and practices that are demonstrably derogating, or facilitating, of our needs and rights. Focusing more closely, Sociocultural Openness, a scale on the BEVI, allows us to understand processes and variables that are associated with, and predictive of, openness to and curiosity about cultures and practices that are different form our own. As such, we consider global data from this scale demonstrating how, why, under what circumstances, and for whom concepts of race / ethnicity (e.g., skin color, hair texture, language, practiced religion and traditions) influence how human identity and self-structures become organized as they are. As we will document, race / ethnicity are potently predictive variables overall. However, individuals who are structured at a “high optimal” level (i.e., more open, accessible, emotionally attuned, critically minded) tend to be much more similar than different across various markers of identity, which suggests that the issue here may not only be categorial variables like race or ethnicity, but deeper aspects of how and why human selves are structured as they are, which also is differentially predictive of a greater inclination and capacity to acknowledge and facilitate needs and rights in self and others. By extension, such findings suggest a need to “reimagine racism,” since these matters are demonstrably and empirically more than black and white. Implications and applications of such findings are discussed in the context of future directions

Material Synthesis: Negotiating experience with digital media

A DVD of six digital film works accompanying the thesis is available with the print copy of this thesis, held at the University of Waikato Library.Given the accessibility of media devices available to us today and utilising van Leeuwen's concept of inscription and synthesis as a guide, this thesis explores the practice of re-presenting a domestic material object, the Croxley Recipe Book, into digital media. Driven by a creative practice research method, but also utilising materiality, digital storytelling practices and modality as important conceptual frames, this project was fundamentally experimental in nature. A materiality-framed content analysis, interpreted through cultural analysis, initially unraveled some of the cookbook's significance and contextualised it within a particular time of New Zealand's cultural history. Through the expressive and anecdotal practice of digital storytelling the cookbook's significance was further negotiated, especially as the material book was engaged with through the affective and experiential digital medium of moving-image. A total of six digital film works were created on an accompanying DVD, each of which represents some of the cookbook's significance but approached through different representational strategies. The Croxley Recipe Book Archive Film and Pav. Bakin' with Mark are archival documentaries, while Pav is more expressive and aligned with the digital storytelling form. Spinning Yarns and Tall Tales, a film essay, engages and reflects with the multiple processes and trajectories of the project, while Extras and The Creative Process Journal demonstrate the emergent nature of the research. The written thesis discusses the emergent nature of the research process and justifies the conceptual underpinning of the research

The Twentieth Century in European Memory

The Twentieth Century in European Memory investigates contested and divisive memories. Focusing on questions of transculturality and reception, the book looks at ways in which such memories are being shared, debated and received by museums, artists, politicians and general audiences Readership: Students and scholars of memory studies and public history, as well as students and scholars of Europan studies and contemporary European and international history, anthropology and cultural studies

Archaeology of memory: Europe's Holocaust dissonances in East and West

From the Second World War onwards European political integration is based on the assumption of a common cultural heritage and the memory of the Holocaust. Yet, does such a mutual heritage and collective memory really exist? Notwithstanding the common roots of European culture, Europe’s nations share most of all a history of war and conflict. Nonetheless, the devastating horrors of two World Wars have for the last six decades stimulated a unique process of unification. Millions of fallen soldiers, the mass slaughter of European civilians, and the destruction of the Jews have determined, by an act of negation, Europe’s postwar humanist identity. Politics of memory and forgetting play a crucial role in this process. Yet, I will argue that after the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) the assumption of the Holocaust as a common European experience, and hence as a basic part of Europe’s postwar identity, raises some critical objections. The Holocaust Paradigm will be challenged by a new ‘Double Genocide’ or Occupation Paradigm, resulting in a deep incompatibility of opinions between Western and Eastern Europe people about the impact, interpretation and meaning of the World Wars and the Cold War. This will ask for completely new interpretations, integrating (and confronting) very different twentieth century European experiences, and a fundamental rethinking of postwar politics of memory