The Voice, Spring 2004: Volume 49, Issue 3

History Students React to the Past ; The Education Is Part of the Package Too; Engineering Program Adds New Options, Hopes to Better Serve Women; Retention Improves Again; New Programs Bring Students to Latin America; New Coordinator Will Link Dordt College Students with Community; Mission Conference Challenges and Inspires Students; Psych Class Helps Test Babies\u27 Memories; Music Alums Come Back to Perform; Anderson Earns Engineering Award; All My Sons Earns a Ticket to ACTF; Participating in ACTF Challenges Actors and Directors; Plumbline: Biblical Holism Is at Work in Africa; Pam Adams Moves to Director of Graduate Education; Van Arendonks Head for Careers in Health Care; Grain Bin Safety Project Receives $1000 I-CASH Grant; Development News; Faculty News; Schaap Book Nominated for Award; Women\u27s Basketball; Men\u27s Basketball; Alumni Weekend 2004: Firmly Planted... Bearing Fruit; Julia Stronks Finds Her Calling in Teaching and Working for Justice; Alumni Artists Exhibit at Dordt College; Alumni Notes; JoAnne de Jager Was on the Front Line of SARS Outbreak in Torontohttps://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/dordt_voice/1062/thumbnail.jp

Traces of the Animal Past

Understanding the relationships between humans and animals is essential to a full understanding of both our present and our shared past. Across the humanities and social sciences, researchers have embraced the ‘animal turn,’ a multispecies approach to scholarship, with historians at the forefront of new research in human-animal studies that blends traditional research methods with interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks that decenter humans in historical narratives. These exciting approaches come with core methodological challenges for scholars seeking to better understand the past from non-anthropocentric perspectives. Whether in a large public archive, a small private collection, or the oral histories of living memories, stories of animals are mediated by the humans who have inscribed the records and organized archival collections. In oral histories, the place of animals in the past are further refracted by the frailty of human memory and recollection. Only traces remain for researchers to read and interpret. Bringing together seventeen original essays by a leading group of international scholars, Traces of the Animal Past showcases the innovative methods historians use to unearth and explain how animals fit into our collective histories. Situating the historian within the narrative, bringing transparency to methodological processes, and reflecting on the processes and procedures of current research, this book presents new approaches and new directions for a maturing field of historical inquiry

Memory, Identity and Migrant Generations: Articulating Italianità in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Northern England through the Case of Kingston upon Hull

Owing to its geographical location and the collapse of its fishing and shipping industries, the UK city of Kingston upon Hull post-WWII rapidly acquired a reputation as a declining outpost of the British nation with no real links to the rest of the world. Yet, historically, Hull has always been a multicultural city that welcomed different migrant communities. Links with Italy, for instance, date back to the 1500s, as the recent ‘Italian Connections’ exhibition, held in one of the local museums, has shown. This exhibition was then also the opportunity to rediscover and reaffirm the existence of an Italian community in the city. This article presents a selection of stories from members of this community, which emerged during and immediately after the exhibition, as a means of exploring the nature of Hull’s historic Italian community and to analyse the extent to which an ‘Anglo-Italian’ identity emerges in this case. It focuses in particular on two case studies: the Coletta and Bottery families. Hirsh’s notion of post-memory and Bedingfield’s idea of trans-memory are used to investigate how members of these families view their Italian background and construct their identities, how memories are transmitted and “translated” across generations, which external factors impacted on their identity construction, and which image of Italy emerges from their recollections. Being able to discuss their family history matters to this group of people: they see this opportunity both as a mechanism by which to reaffirm their personal histories and heritage and as a way to uncover a hidden aspect of Hull’s past which can impact positively on the city’s future

Traces of the Animal Past

Understanding the relationships between humans and animals is essential to a full understanding of both our present and our shared past. Across the humanities and social sciences, researchers have embraced the ‘animal turn,’ a multispecies approach to scholarship, with historians at the forefront of new research in human-animal studies that blends traditional research methods with interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks that decenter humans in historical narratives. These exciting approaches come with core methodological challenges for scholars seeking to better understand the past from non-anthropocentric perspectives. Whether in a large public archive, a small private collection, or the oral histories of living memories, stories of animals are mediated by the humans who have inscribed the records and organized archival collections. In oral histories, the place of animals in the past are further refracted by the frailty of human memory and recollection. Only traces remain for researchers to read and interpret. Bringing together seventeen original essays by a leading group of international scholars, Traces of the Animal Past showcases the innovative methods historians use to unearth and explain how animals fit into our collective histories. Situating the historian within the narrative, bringing transparency to methodological processes, and reflecting on the processes and procedures of current research, this book presents new approaches and new directions for a maturing field of historical inquiry

On the existence and implications of nonbelieved memories

In this article, we review the state of knowledge about a previously-assumed-to-be-rare memory phenomenon called nonbelieved memories. Nonbelieved memories are a counterintuitive phenomenon in which vivid autobiographical memories are no longer believed to have happened even though vivid recollective features remain present. Such memories stand in contrast to the more typical situation that when events are recollected they are also believed to have genuinely occurred. We review data on the frequency, characteristics, and factors that contribute to the development of naturally occurring and laboratory-induced nonbelieved memories and discuss the relationships of nonbelieved memories with theories of autobiographical remembering and the study of remembering in applied domains

Memories for Life: A Review of the Science and Technology

This paper discusses scientific, social and technological aspects of memory. Recent developments in our understanding of memory processes and mechanisms, and their digital implementation, have placed the encoding, storage, management and retrieval of information at the forefront of several fields of research. At the same time, the divisions between the biological, physical and the digital worlds seem to be dissolving. Hence opportunities for interdisciplinary research into memory are being created, between the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences. Such research may benefit from immediate application into information management technology as a testbed. The paper describes one initiative, Memories for Life, as a potential common problem space for the various interested disciplines