Historic wrongs often live on in the present. Survivors and their advocates frequently turn to current administrations, seeking recognition and reparations for wrongdoings that governments in the past were involved in. But remedies rarely come easily. For example, because people remember the past differently; because they question their responsibility for remedying past wrongs; or because public officials are reluctant to accept responsibility on behalf of the state because of legal, financial, political, and other concerns.
This course examines the strategic challenges of reckoning with history. It offers frameworks that help diagnose “living history” to understand how groups (choose to) remember the past. It also focuses on concrete measures that are intended to come to terms with the past, which survivors might seek and which government officials may offer— from official apologies to financial reparations, and from removing or erecting monuments to civic curriculum reform.
The course prepares students to be astute analysts of collective memory as well as strategic agents of change in current affairs. It centers not around grand theories of justice, but around local cases that are written from a variety of perspectives of social actors on opposing sides of the issues.
