This site-based, 3-credit interdisciplinary field school will introduce students firsthand to the “social lives” of key sites of Holocaust history and memory in the city of Kraków, Poland (and selected other sites). We will together explore how the state, community groups, and creative practitioners of “memory work,” make use of and (critically) re-interpret sites of wartime violence for a variety of purposes. We will also consider the effects of a range of forces – from government attempts to legislate memory, to heritage tourism, to natural and environmental factors – on the changing shapes and meanings of memory sites.

Using the city of Kraków as a home base, we will read and discuss key scholarly texts (sometimes with their authors), hear guest lectures, visit a range of historical sites (German Nazi camps, former Jewish districts, monuments, and museums), and meet local artists and activists who have worked to activate  and expand Polish memory culture against social and political pressures to forget. We will attend to both conventional and less-commonly acknowledged social and material processes that influence remembering in post-conflict sites. The goal of this field school is to transform the way you think about how societies remember.

For more information, visit Concordia International.