2018 Summer School Courses

2016 Orli Fridman 

Memory and Conflict: Remembering and Forgetting in Divided Societies

Course Description


This course invites students to explore the study of conflict analysis and conflict transformation through a journey in the field of social memory studies. The course will focus on the role of memory politics in peace and conflict studies.  By doing so, the course will allow students to delve into the analysis of internal dynamics of societies in or after conflict and discuss the ways in which they negotiate their pasts, presents and futures in the aftermath of war, conflict, repression, dictatorship, genocide and mass atrocities.

The course will explore dynamics and frameworks enabling the social organization of memory, and modes in which entire communities (and not only individuals) preserve remember and forget the past, commemorate it, deny or obliterate it.  Finally, the course will highlight practices related to memory work and memory activism in spaces of mnemonic conflicts over the narratives and representations of the past.

In order to do so, students will be introduced to some underpinning concepts in social memory studies and in conflict studies. Students will then apply this theoretical knowledge to a number of case studies, allowing them to further investigate the role of memory and memory activism in conflict analysis, and think comparatively about processes in conflict and post-conflict transformation.

Course Structure

  • Theoretical introduction to memory politics, conflict analysis and Conflict Transformation;
  • Collective Memory and National Calendars: collective memory, community memory, social organization of national memory, commemorative events, memory laws;
  • Memory work and memory activism in and after conflict.

Case studies may include

  • Revisiting 1948: Mnemonic Socializations & Memory Activism among Israelis & Palestinians;
  • Remembering the Wars of the 1990s? From Anti-War Activism to Memory Activism in Serbia;

 


 

orli fridman

Dr. Orli Fridman holds a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (SCAR), George Mason University (2006). Dr. Fridman is an associate professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK), Singidunum University where she heads the Center for Comparative Conflict Studies (CFCCS). She also is the academic director of the SIT study abroad program in the Balkans (Peace and Conflict Studies in Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo).

Her interdisciplinary research interests focus on Conflict Transformation and Comparative Conflict Studies.  Her recent research projects focus on Kosovo-Serbia relations and on Memory Work and Memory Activism in Serbia. She also is interested in the role of social memory studies in teaching and researching conflict transformation in divided societies as well as in critical approaches to encounters of groups in conflict (with focus on Serbia-Kosovo and Israeli-Palestinian relations). 

Since 1994, Dr. Fridman has been involved in political education. She was trained as a facilitator for groups in conflict and worked with groups from Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and the successor states of the former Yugoslavia.

Her most recent publications include: ”Alternative Calendars and Memory Work in Serbia: Anti-War Activism after Milošević” (Memory Studies 8, 2015); Unstructured Daily Encounters: Serbs in Kosovo after the 2008 Declaration of Independence" (Contemporary Southeastern Europe, 2/1, 2015); “Structured Encounters in Post-Conflict/Post-Yugoslav Days: Visiting Belgrade and Prishtina” (Civil Society and Transitional Justice in the Balkans, 2013).


 

CONTACT US


  • Karadjordjeva 65
    11000 Belgrade, Serbia

 

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